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I HE WAY I 
PERSONALITY 





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THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 



THE WAY TO 
PERSONALITY 

<A Study in Christian Values 



BY 

GEORGE B. ROBSON 



NEW YORK 
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY 

443 FOURTH AVENUE 

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PREFACE 

(IN TIME OF WAR) 

There are men who tell us that this un- 
paralleled war has written on the wall the 
doom of Christianity. Those whose Christ 
is not after the flesh know that it is not so, but 
there are some, to whom Christ is still Lord, 
who wonder if Jesus was not in some things 
pertaining to His teaching a child of His time, 
and whether He would give the same counsels 
if He were amongst us in the body to-day. 
And there are others by whom Jesus and His 
counsels have been definitely dismissed, if not 
condemned, as being no longer equal to the 
occasion. 

We shall certainly have to make up our 
minds about these things if we desire to be 
sure that never again shall such a calamity 
be sprung upon an unprepared Christian 
Church. 

Has the teaching of Jesus any real and final 
value for the complex relationships of life in 
the present day ? This book attempts to 
answer that question. 

GEORGE B. ROBSON. 

Christmas, 191 5. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

PART I.— THE WILL TO PERSONALITY 

I. THE LADDER TO THE STARS - - - -13 

II. THE AGE-LONG QUEST ----- 23 

III. THE HERO OF HEROES ----- 30 

IV. SONS OF GOD ------ 41 

V. THE SON OF MAN - - - - - 48 

VI. THE CHRISTIAN END ----- 55 



PART II.— THE CHRISTIAN TYPE 

I.— THE BEATITUDES ------ 63 

II. THE FIRST STEP TO LIFE ----- 69 

III. DIVINE DISCONTENT 76 

IV. THE WAY THAT SUCCEEDS 82 
V. THE PASSION FOR RIGHTNESS 89 

VI. CONSIDERATENESS -5 96 

VII. THE SENSE OF DIRECTION - 103 

VIII. THE PEACEMAKERS - - K>8 

IX. PAYING THE PRICE ----- 114 

X. THE RESULT - Il8 



io Contents 

CHAPTER PACS 

PART III.— THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

I. ANOTHER LOOK AT JESUS HIMSELF ~ - - I29 

II. A NEW BEGINNING - 136 

III. PERSONALITY BY ADVENTURE - I44 

IV. PERSONALITY BY FAITH - - - - l62 
V. PERSONALITY BY WORSHIP AND PRAYER - - 1 69 

VI. PERSONALITY BY FELLOWSHIP- - I76 

APPENDIX A.— By Way of Application. 

I. THE NEED FOR CHRISTIAN THINKING - - - 187 

II. THE CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY - 189 

III. CHRISTIANITY AND WAR - I96 

IV. CHRISTIANITY AND INDUSTRY - 201 

APPENDIX B. 

ON NIETZSCHE ____-- 208 



PART I. 
THE WILL TO PERSONALITY 

" That Man must still to some new worship press 
Hath in his eye ever but served to show 

The depth of the consuming restlessness 
Which makes man's deepest woe." 

Matthew Arnold. 

" When we become the enfoldevs of those orbs, and the pleasure 
and knowledge of everything in them, shall we be filled and satisfied 
then ? 

" No, we but level that lift to pass and continue beyond." 

Walt Whitman. 



CHAPTER I 

THE LADDER TO THE STARS 

There is no satisfactory definition of Man. Wise 
men have described him as the clothes-wearing animal, 
the tool-using animal, the laughing animal. But 
I heard one day in the street a description that went 
deeper than those of the wise men. A mother was 
addressing her small son from the door step. 

" You are a discontented little animal," she 
declared, " That's what's the matter with you. ' 

She was nearer the truth than she realised. That 
is what is the matter with mankind generally. The 
clothes and the tools of man are but the expression 
of his discontent, and even his laughter, often so near 
to tears, springs from his sense of the gulf between 
what is and what might be. 

William Blake has pictured him finely in the 
few inches of a woodcut — a morsel of unrest at the 
foot of a ladder whose top is among the stars. His 
cry goes out into space, " I want ! I want ! " 

That ancestor of yours, sitting at the door of his 
cave a hundred thousand years ago, contemplating 
the possibility of making the first handled tool by 
tying a sharp stone to a stick, — it was true of him. 
The one thing we can say with any certainty about 
him is that he wanted something more than he had. 
Whatever he got suggested something better, and 
perhaps the next would be the finally satisfying 
thing. But it never was. And as, by the time he 
had carefully finished his tool he had begun to outgrow 

13 



14 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

it, so, when at last he wrought his dreams into thoughts, 
and his thoughts into speech, there was always some- 
thing from the dream left over in his heart. It is so 
still. 

In time he found a means of saying what words 
cannot utter, and the plaint of the reed and the 
throb of the drum tell the tale of his longing. Is it 
not the secret of music that it whispers to us of the 
way we have come, and grips our hearts with that 
same unrest which first set man on his adventure ? 
It is the homesickness of the soul which cries out 
on the violins. The oboe tells the story of all our 
wanderings and sorrows. The trumpets are surely 
the echo of that challenge to things which rings 
within us. And the noblest of all music, in which 
strife and unrest are ended and only pure joy remains, 
is it not a hint of the song we shall sing when at last 
we shall have won home ? 

At some time the unceasing pressure of man's 
unrest, his sense of the never filled gap between 
dream and deed became articulate, and he made an 
account of it. The story of Eden and the fall, and 
similar attempts, come out of the deepest conscious- 
ness of our race. Wise men do not laugh at them. 
They are as true as Blake's picture and mean much 
the same thing. 

When man enters history, and from then until 
now, the story is woven about the names and deeds 
of those in whom the spirit of unrest found the readiest 
listeners. They stand out in every page, these 
pioneers, and in every field of achievement, and not 
only for deeds reckoned good. Even the ' bad" 
has won admiration when it was big enough and 
savoured sufficiently of life. Men have honoured 
the doer, the thinker, the finder, the maker, because 
in him they saw fulfilled a little of what they craved 
after. His victory was their victory ; he had enlarged 



THE LADDER TO THE STARS 15 

the bounds of life for them. If they could not lead, 
at least they could follow. The one thing they could 
not comfortably do was sit still. 

What is this spirit of unrest, this driving force 
which urges us on without ceasing ? What is it we 
want ? 

Thinkers of one sort and another have answered 
our questions. 

Plato, you remember, put down our unrest to the 
fact that we are of heavenly birth, and that, despite 
the heavy layer of earthliness which clings to us, 
a memory of our origin now and then struggles through. 
Poets have followed him. 

Not in entire forgetfulness, 
And not in utter nakedness, 
But trailing clouds of glory do we come 
From God, who is our home. 

The answer of the poet-philosopher and the philoso- 
pher-poet, put into clumsier words, would seem to be 
that the unrest of man is just a spiritual home- sickness. 
Like Eden to Adam, the gates we came out of are 
guarded by flaming swords. But if we go right 
away round we are sure that we shall find an open 
gate and a welcome at the other side and enter again 
into that free life where man gives names at his will 
to all creation. And may be we shall find the ancient 
taboo removed, and eat not only of the tree of know- 
ledge, but also of the tree of life. 

When poetry and philosophy join forces, they can 
present a strong case. 

Another answer from philosophy without poetry 
The driving force behind our demand for something 
more is the Desire for Happiness. This is not a dispute 
about words, but if we take them at their ordinary 
valuation that answer does not cover the ground. 
Happiness is an accompaniment, a by-product a 
follower that like other followers has sometimes 



16 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

to take his own chance of coming in at the end. Not 
that he is not always welcome, but he could not always 
be kept in mind while the main business was being 
done. 

A philosopher who had no faith in happiness at 
all has told us that what urges us on — or at least 
keeps us going — is the Will to Live. He makes it 
sound quite reasonable until we think of splendid 
and terrible things done by men with an exaltation 
of spirit which makes the Will to Live look poor 
and shrunken. Then we look for something that 
sounds more hopeful. 

Is it the Will to Power ? 

" Wherever I found a living thing, there found 
I Will to Power. . . . 

" He certainly did not hit the truth who shot at it 
the formula : ■ Will to existence,' that will doth 
not exist ! 

" For what is not, cannot will ; that, however, which 
is in existence — how could it still strive for existence? 

" Only where there is life, is there also will : not, 
however, Will to Life, but— so I teach thee— Will 
to Power 1 "* 

There is one weakness in this answer. It is not 
sufficient as it stands. Power is of no use until it 
is applied, and when Nietzsche tells that the driving 
force behind our discontent is Will to Power, we 
are bound to ask, if we wish to be clear, Power, — to 
what ? It is the more important because his phrase 
is meant not only for an explanation but for an ideal, 
so that to get wrong at the beginning is to be wrong 
all the way. We will all agree with Nietzsche's 
answer if we can fill in the "to what ? " in our own 
way. 

We are told that the idea flashed upon the mind 
of Nietzsche as he watched a regiment of artillery 

* Thus spake Zarathustra, II., 34. 



THE LADDER TO THE STARS 17 

thunder past him, gay with the brilliant uniform 
of 1870. Perhaps the source of his inspiration, 
coupled with the fact that he himself was of sickly 
body, and but for that would have been actor rather 
than spectator, explains why " Will to Power " came 
to carry for him the meaning, power to appropriate, 
to injure, to exploit others, — in short, the Will to 
Bully. He was wrong in finding that in every living 
thing, for we have good reasons for believing that 
within the bounds of the same species and even 
beyond them there is no such universal exploitation, 
but a large measure of co-operation. In any case, 
however, the rule of the jungle need not be a rule 
for us. 

It is one of Nietzsche's fundamental errors, due, 
it would seem, to a sentimentalism which so often 
leads him to mistake violence and swagger and 
impudence for power, and to demand that virtue 
shall carry itself with the air of a truculent drill 
sergeant. 

Not power to exploit, but power to ? 

Perhaps we can come to a better understanding 
if we try our second question. What is it we want ? 
I will speak for myself as an ordinary man. 

I enjoy life well enough to want to continue in it, 
and I prefer to be happy. But I do not want these 
things naked, so to speak. There are some things 
without which existence would be intolerable, and 
I am quite prepared to risk happiness in trying for 
them. There are things I want to do, things I see 
could be done. I want to do them — in my way if 
possible, or help in the doing of them if they are beyond 
my single strength. At any rate, to see them done. 
I want my sense of fitness and beauty and fair-dealing 
satisfied in the world of things and activities and 
men. I want to have the discords resolved and the 
story make a good ending. There are things I want 



18 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

to be. I want to be master in my own house ; to be 
free. I want to know. I want to get round the next 
corner. In a word, I want to express myself com- 
pletely in life. 

I may be foolish in my wants, but I do not think 
I am singular. 

The driving force behind this desire, behind all 
human life, now comes more clearly into view. It 
is a stirring moment to stand and watch the guns 
sweep by, and Nietzsche was led astray by it. Had 
he been less susceptible to mere noise and display 
he would have gone a step further and hit upon a 
more real world than the one he discovered. 

The driving force behind human life is Will to 
Personality. 

It was true of the first man. The dawning of 
Personality was the beginning of his unrest. What 
disappointed him all the time was that he never 
got himself quite expressed in anything he did or 
experienced. Not that he knew what he wanted 
or even thought about it. You are a long way on the 
road to getting what you want when you know just 
what it is. Even the idea of Personality is com- 
paratively new. But every new experience of man 
added something to him, though it did not always 
make him happy. Everything he acquired promised 
him a longer reach, though it sometimes became 
an additional burden to carry. When he ate the heart 
of his enemy he had a dim idea that he absorbed some 
thing vital and himself became something bigger 
thereby. 

" The history of mankind," says Mr. H. G. Wells, 
" is the history of the attainment of external 
power." It is more than that, it is the story of his 
long journey towards Personality. All his tragedies 
come out of the fact that he has so often missed 
the way. 



THE LADDER TO THE STARS 19 

Our individual bodies, we are told, go through 
a sort of resume of the physical history of our race. 
Is is not also true of ourselves as persons ? 

" It is not to diffuse you that you were born of your mother 

and father, it is to identify you. . . . 
Something long preparing and formless is arrived and formed 

in you, 
You are henceforth secure, whatever comes or goes. . . 
And I have dreamed that the purpose and essence of the known 

life, the transient, 
Is to form and decide identity for the unknown life, the 

permanent, "f 

God, the old stories tell us, made man in His own 
image. He compounded him of the dust of the earth 
and gave him life, not as to the rest of the animals, 
by a word, but by breathing into his nostrils the 
breath of life — His own breath. I think they were 
quite deliberate also when they pictured man as being 
made alone, carefully, in a special day's work, for 
he is the greatest of God's experiments. Man became 
a living soul and started on his journey to the stars. 

When I have told Eastern villagers this story 
they have said in reply, " Then the real part of man 
has the same nature as God." We may leave it at 
that. 



" And now," you say, " please define Personality." 
I am reminded of the story of Socrates. " How 
shall we bury you ? " said Crito. " As you please," 
was the answer, " only you must catch me first." 

That is the difficulty about defining Personality ; 
we have not caught it yet. There was a time when 
it was freely defined in such ways as this : — " Person- 
ality is that self-hood which shuts itself up against 
everything else, excluding it thereby from itself." 

t Walt Whitman : To Think of Time. 



20 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

The philosopher opened box after box of the puzzle 
until he came to the last. That is the magic box, 
which will not open until you know the trick, and 
when it is open turns out not to be a box at all, but 
a door into fairyland. The philosopher thought 
it was solid ; it was his mistake. What he denned 
was the self-consciouness out of which Personality 
has to grow. 

Wise men are rather shy of defining Personality 
now. They tell us that complete Personality belongs 
only to God, that it is not a hard and dead thing, 
but a living thing, and for us an ideal ; that it is 
possible that only a small part of our personality 
has managed so far to find expression. They use 
the figure of an iceberg, of which the greater part 
is submerged. They have spoken of the subconscious 
mind, a reservoir of unknown powers. 

If that suggestion has been to some extent dis- 
credited because the subconscious seems also to be 
the fount of our most foolish and wayward dreams, 
it is only to make way for the better suggestion that 
our personality cannot be sharply marked off at 
either end, that there is a super-conscious area also, 
from which spring those ideas which we cannot 
positively define or imagine but which, none the 
less, form the background of our thinking. Man is 
discontented. Why should he be ? How explain 
his idea of a perfect world, of a complete personal 
life, of things infinite ? Only by assuming that they 
are the steadfast background against which he can 
perceive the changes and limitations amongst which 
he finds himself. He sees, but he cannot analyse 
or define what as yet is beyond his reach. 

We shall only know what complete Personality 
is when we have reached it. " It doth not yet appear 
what we shall be." For the present we can only 
describe Personality — not define it — as, that within 



THE LADDER TO THE STARS 21 

us which takes hold of life and environment and uses 
them for self -organisation and self-expression. 

It is the most important thing about us, this some- 
thing which Socrates felt could not be caught, which 
we cannot exactly define ; so important that 
instinctively we turn to it as the measure and test 
of value for everything else. 

There have been teachers to tell us that we are 
wrong in so doing, religions which tell us that our 
idea is an illusion, organisations whose object is to 
override us, but they have not yet succeeded in 
killing that instinct, nor is it likely that they will. 
They would have been better employed in helping 
us to understand it and in guiding us into right ways 
of fulfilling it. The greatest personality our race 
has seen, and still the most discussed, appealed to his 
hearers and said, " Why do not even ye yourselves 
judge what is right ? " When he wanted to find a 
phrase for the most hopeful thing that ever happened 
to one of his characters, he said, " He came to himself." 
It was not the end of his journey, but it was the 
beginning. 

The Indian goldsmith carries in his equipment 
a small black stone upon which he rubs what is offered 
to him for gold. He seems by its use to be able to 
tell fairly accurately what proportion of gold is in 
any alloy you may give him. 

We will use what we know of Personality for our 
touchstone. 

That which best answers my Will to Personality, 
which is found finally to give the greatest field to 
it or, in other words, what most enlarges life for me, 
is good. 

That which thwarts my Will to Personality, which 
denies it expression, which limits life, is evil. 

That method of living which tends most to the 
enlargement of life and the deliverance of Personality 



22 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

from hindrances and entanglements and illusions 
will be the wise way of living. 

And since, so far as we can discover, the production 
and development of Personality, is the final reason 
for the existence of this world, or, in other words, 
that my Will to Personality is derived from some 
infinite Personality, since we must attribute Person- 
ality to that which makes us persons, then such 
way of living will be what religious people call the 
Will of God, and ultimately, therefore, the only 
successful way of living. 

That religion or view of the world which gives 
Personality the greatest value, which brings it into 
the largest place without losing it by the way, will 
be the truth for me. 



CHAPTER II 

THE AGE-LONG QUEST 

If we are right in thinking that our achievement of 
Personality is the end of the Creative Will, of which 
we are, so far, the highest expression, will not the way 
of achievement be obvious ? Will it not be the line 
of least resistance ? There are good reasons against 
such a conclusion. Experience suggests to us, — No 
resistance, no achievement. Every stage of life, 
from the lowest upwards, involves the overcoming 
of resistance. The only things we can use or even 
know in the external world are those which offer 
some resistance. 

Take the aviator as a parable. His ambition 
is to fly ; his object is to overcome the downward 
pull of the earth and the resistance of the air. He 
makes his machine as light as possible and as little 
wind-resisting. He finds that even so small a matter 
as the shape of a wire affects his speed. Yet, without 
the pull of the earth he dare not go up, for he might 
not be able to get down again, and without the 
resistance of the air he could not get up or fly when 
he was there. The line of least resistance would be 
to leave flying to the birds. 

Is the way, then, the line of most resistance ? 
I do not quite know what that would be in aviation, 
and, indeed, it sounds rather a foolish question, but 
the line of most resistance has practically been 
suggested as the way to the highest good. To exploit, 
to use other persons as tools, to be master by brute 
force, to win, not by co-operation but by compulsion, 

23 



24 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

that has been tried and advocated, and to some 
people still seems the true way. It does not work ; 
it never has worked, and when carried out to the 
end means self-destruction. 

The achievement of Personality is a greater adven- 
ture than the conquest of the air. 

Apart from such reasons, however, the history 
of man suggests that the way is narrow and the gate 
strait. What have seemed obvious ways have not 
been a great success. The defects in the present 
order of the world scarcely need detailing. Every 
now and then some one arises to declare passionately 
that all our knowledge, all our discoveries, have 
but left man in the same old bondage to things. 
There seems to be some queer kink in the nature 
of man by which he manages to pervert the greatest 
gift to evil and destructive uses. We sometimes 
talk as if progress was automatic and certain, but 
it is not so certain as the fact that things left to them- 
selves do not get better, and that every gain has not 
only to be won but also maintained at great cost 
and by unceasing vigilance. And when we have done 
bragging of our Progress, the uncomfortable thought 
creeps in : — What is the good of it all if it does not 
result in the production of finer and yet finer personal- 
ities ? Do the ways we have individually or corporately 
tried do this ? 

Yet we can picture Utopias. It has been a favourite 
recreation of man. But when we said, " Yes, beautiful, 
Now show us how ! " the trouble began. Blake's 
picture of the ladder to the stars seems to have one 
defect. Should he not have left the ladder out ? 
Is there anything so obvious as a ladder about the 
way to Personality ? It seems more like the search 
after the Holy Grail. It was somewhere, waiting 
to be found, but only rare souls ever caught sight of 
it, and they blazed no way for others to follow. 



THE AGE-LONG QUEST 25 

In connection with the description of Personality 
the phrase " self-expression " was used. But which 
self are we to express ? As someone plaintively 
said, " There are such a lot of me ! " We remember 
Whitman's " I contain multitudes." I find in myself 
animal desires and instincts, desires of the mind, 
capabilities, limitations, timidities, hopes, aspirations, 
aversions, odd peculiarities of temperament, a certain 
general condition of bodily health, — a miscellaneous 
assortment indeed, often not on the best of terms 
with one another. That they all condition the 
possibilities of Personality there can be no doubt, 
and what is more, any of them seem capable, on small 
encouragement, of claiming to be the self which is 
to be expressed. 

Personality is the kingdom I am to win. It is clear 
that if any one of these things is in control and denies 
the rest, or if there is no control, but only anarchy 
and disorder, if there is continuous civil war or crises 
of revolution with a new president after each, I must 
expect the weakness that follows such things. Is 
there in me that which has the right to be master, 
which all will acknowledge and serve if it makes its 
proper claim ? 

Is there anyway at all, or is this a purely individual 
adventure in which no man can help another or even 
pass on a useful hint or two to save him from the 
worst mistakes ? Somehow we cannot quite accept 
that as it stands. We continue to be invincibly 
hopeful. We build our Utopias, our castles in the 
air, each generation trying to improve on the picture. 
The fact that we can, or think we can, improve on 
the picture is encouraging. And each man of every 
generation tries to realise for himself some little 
corner of security in which he may have leisure and 
freedom to express himself. How pathetic that after 
all these years of corporate life, of learning how 



26 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

to live, it should still be to countless thousands of 
men the summum bonum, — a little security, a little 
space to turn round in, where one may feel the dignity 
of personal being before going to the grave ! 

Is there any universal way to Personality ? In 
detail, perhaps not. That would seem to be the 
failure of all codes of laws. The more detailed they 
are, the more certainly they are out of date before 
the ink on them is dry. The more exacting they are, 
the more free men resent them as an insult to their 
dignity. Freedom is part of our demand and, like 
Personality, is a thing to be won. The code of laws 
chokes us. Our personality wilts and shrivels or 
else violently rebels in that air. 

Yet surely if there is a right and true end, there 
will be a right and true way. It may turn out to be 
quite simple, missed by men for that very reason. 
Maybe part of our difficulty is that we do not form 
right or clear conceptions of what the thing we seek 
is. It is of the nature of the case that we cannot say 
of perfect Personality that it will contain just these 
qualities and attributes and no more, but is there 
any sort of standard, anything to measure by at all ? 
Can we liken the perfect Personality to anything 
else ? 

We took, for a working description of Personality, 
that it is that within us which seeks self-organisation 
and self-expression in life and environment. I do 
not say that we can describe God in that way, but 
we must attribute something like that to the Creative 
Will, however far short of the truth it may come ? 
If there is truth in that, it suggests, as has been 
remarked before, that we shall have to look Godwards 
for our idea of Personality. This seems like going 
round in a circle, or explaining the little known by 
the unknown, but I am not sure that it is. My own| 
inclination is to think that we really know God better; 



THE AGE-LONG QUEST 27 

than we know anything else. Our difficulty is that 
we do not recognise our knowledge as knowledge 
of God, because we have so often made up our minds 
beforehand what God ought to be, and so get lost 
in arguments and reasons, instead of following the 
impulse of our nature. We are afraid to let ourselves 
go. That is the trouble with most of us. Mean- 
while let it be said that " man apart from God " is 
a theological invention. 

There is, however, another way, which it may 
be wiser to take for a beginning, though we may 
find it lead into the one we are leaving. If the achieve- 
ment of Personality is the end of the natural order, 
it would seem right to argue that perfect Personality 
must be something in the Creative Will which seeks 
expression in our personalities, and that there might 
in the course of history be attempts at achievement 
which would help us, revelations of Personality 
which would serve as guides for us. Is not that the 
direction in which we must look ? Remember the 
wise words of Plato : " The really brave man will 
either learn or discover the truth ; or if that be 
impossible he will take the best of human words and 
the most irrefragable, and, carried on that as on a 
raft, will sail through life in continual jeopardy, unless 
he shall find some secure position, some divine word, 
if it might be." 

And if the divine word could be a shining example, 
how much better ! It is an example we want. We 
begin all things by the imitation of what appeals 
to us. There is no other way, for we come into a 
world which is already a great inheritance and stand 
upon the shoulders of countless generations. We do 
not dream of beginning at the beginning and working 
out everything for ourselves. We awake to science, 
to art, to music, to poetry, to discovery, by contact 
with others, above all by contact with those who 



28 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

have been great enough to make a universal appeal. 
Our very language has been made for us. We have 
to learn it by imitation. We take thankfully all 
that has been won for us and use it ; we improve 
on it if we can ; we apply it in new directions if the 
occasion arises. That is how we keep moving on 
and succeed in pushing back a little farther the limi- 
tations and mysteries that surround us. 

Now in this matter of Personality there are countless 
teachers, codes of laws, lists of virtues, philosophies, 
religions, traditions, rules of life. The choice is 
bewildering. When we come to make our selection, 
how are we to judge ? There are some questions we 
can ask. WHiat is the end they propose to us ? Will 
it satisfy our demand for Personality ? There are 
some, for instance, that begin by telling us that our 
Will to Personality is the thing we must renounce 
as an illusion. The end they propose is the extin- 
guishing of Personality. Can we accept that ? 

Others tell us the virtues we must practise or the 
vices from which we must abstain. They do not always 
tell us why. We like to know why. And if they can 
persuade us that this is the way to Personality, there 
is still another question to the teacher, " How did it 
work in your case ? " 

Alas ! alas ! Human, all-too-human, these teachers, 
or may be not human enough. 

We are sometimes told that we must not look 
at the lives of those who would teach us, that all 
we need to ask is whether their words are true or 
false. But that will never do in this matter. The 
moral character of a gardener may make no difference 
to the correctness of his advice on planting potatoes, 
but to go for advice on Personality to a man whose 
own Personality bears too obviously the marks of 
discord would be like going for advice on potato 
planting to a man whose own potatoes never came 



THE AGE-LONG QUEST 29 

up. If all I want is a list of moral virtues I can get 
that easily enough. I can make one myself for that 
matter. But I am not alone, I think, in being a little 
weary of moralists. Let me have a sight of some 
satisfying personality. I shall be glad to hear him. 
Show me the teacher who is greater than his teaching, 
who himself is the greater part of his teaching. Tell 
me where to look for the Pioneer who has won through 
and found that finally satisfying life which I seek. 
He, if he can be found, will be my safest guide. He 
will also be most fully expressive of the Creative Will. 
If God can reveal Himself and His purpose at all, 
it will be through a personality. 

It is one of our frequent delusions that, because 
ideas come before things and accomplishments, because 
a living idea is a mighty power in the world, the 
expression of ideas in words is the highest activity 
that man is capable of. We have come to think of 
the truth as a certain order of words. We are wrong. 
Ideas are born of personalities and can only find 
their full expression there. The truth is to be lived. 
As Whitman says, " He is greatest who contributes 
the greatest original practical example." 

The claim of the prologue to the fourth gospel 
is that the intention of God in fulfilment of which 
all things were created, which had not found full 
expression either in things or sensations or thoughts, 
was at last manifested in a human personality. " The 
Word became flesh and dwelt among us." Only 
prejudice, one thinks, would forbid the examination 
of so promising a claim as that. 



CHAPTER III 

THE HERO OF HEROES 

"He masters whose Spirit masters ; he tastes sweetest who results 
sweetest in the long run.' T — Whitman. 

In view of the statement with which the last chapter 
closed we turn with some hope to the story of Jesus. 
Let us be clear as to the object of our search. We are 
not looking for what we may conceive to be a morally 
perfect character, though the character of Jesus 
has exhausted the praise of men. We are looking 
for the most vital and complete personality. For 
that purpose we need only to start with the undeni- 
able fact that no other person has produced such 
an effect upon men. A park orator exclaimed, 
" Who was Jesus after all ? A person of no importance 
whatever ! " The correct answer came from the 
crowd. " Why can't you let Him alone then ? " 

From His first public appearance Jesus has been a 
sword dividing men, He who came to be a reconciler. 
No personality has been so much or so eagerly dis- 
cussed, or is, even now. The very books of those 
who attack Him most fiercely are dated from the 
reputed year of His birth, and bear witness on the 
title page and in the contents that no one has left 
such an abiding impression on the world. Of none 
other who ever lived can it be said that millions 
are convinced that He is still alive and still a presence 
of help and good cheer. Even if they are quite 
wrong it is amazing. 

3© 



THE HERO OF HEROES 31 

Every possible theory has been put forward to 
account for His personality, even the most preposterous. 
I have read a book which proposed to account for 
Jesus by the theory that He must have had a fall and 
injured His head in His youth ! That way to greatness, 
however, has not gained many adherents. What 
I think must surely be the last tribute to the greatness 
of Jesus has been seriously offered in our own day. 
He has been explained away. " There never weren't 
no such person." He is too overwhelming to be 
credible. 

Not only His enemies, but His friends have found 
themselves in difficulties. He is so various, so many- 
sided, that men are continually bringing to light 
some aspect of His life and making it the explanation 
of everything. He is a profound mystic — and all 
else has been added by stupid and commonplace 
people. He is a social reformer — and the rest was 
invented by the theologians. He is a violent apoca- 
lyptic herald — and the rest was added when the 
expectations He aroused were not fulfiled as men 
expected. He is the Man of Sorrows. He is the 
preacher of a new discipline, the discipline of joy. 
He is a revolutionist. He is the peace giver. He 
is a voice calling to adventure and pain. He is the 
most human of the children of men. He is God. 
Something can be said for all these, and a great deal 
for most of them. 

It was on the personality rather than the teaching 
of Jesus that the Church gave its verdict. Emerson 
complains that the Church has dwelt with noxious 
exaggeration on the person of Jesus. All the more 
encouraging to us on our quest. It is a great and 
impressive personality we are looking for. The first 
importance of the gospel story for us is that it 
enshrines such a personality and enables us to gather 
something of the impression that Jesus made upon 



32 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

those who tell His story. We will turn to it as we 
might take up any other biography. 

Jesus is pictured for us there as setting out into 
public life under the obligation of a great mission. 
We may say, for the present, that He felt it to be His 
business to show men that all their most wonderful 
dreams of the perfection of human life and personality 
sprang from an impulse that was God given, and 
that the face of the world might be changed whenever 
men were willing. To change the face of the world 
is a large enough mission, and when we go on to con- 
sider the means Jesus proposed to use the wonder 
grows. Such ways as greatness or ambition had 
hitherto used to impress its will upon the world 
He dismissed as stupid and beneath Him. That is 
the meaning of the Temptation. The Nietzschean 
type of "great man" He judged, not with envy or 
malice, but with humour, and so, from above. " The 
kings of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their 
oppressors are styled Benefactors ! "* He saw, behind 
the swagger, the parasite accepting " with a good 
conscience the sacrifice of a legion of individuals 
who, for its sake, must be suppressed and reduced 
to imperfect men, to slaves and instruments. "f 

Yet with the sense of a mission and of His own 
place in it beyond that which has overturned the 
reason of lesser men, He remains sane and wholesome. 
He moves deliberately to the end, turned aside neither 
by the misunderstandings of friends, the malice of 
foes, nor by any inducement to take an easier way 
or to snatch a cheap success. 

When dark days come and the price of faithfulness 
to His convictions is that of apparent failure, His 
personality stands out none the less. Indignity 
cannot demean Him, and what would be the story 

* Twentieth Century, N.T. 
t Beyond Good and Evil, 258. 



THE HERO OF HEROES 33 

of a sordid criminal execution shines with the lustre 
He sheds over it. His disciples, on their own showing, 
are torn between adoration and bewilderment, but 
they cling to Him as a drowning sailor to a rock, and 
their dismay at the end is as though a rock had 
suddenly crumbled in their hands. He was so big, 
so strong, that this was incredible. There can be few 
things harder than to have to defeat the expectations 
of one's own friends. 

Later on, when they were convinced, reasonably 
or not, that He was still alive, Peter tried to explain 
how it had come about. He gives the very explanation 
which our quest demands, though he had not our 
word. It was a question of Personality. He had 
overcome death " because it was not possible that 
He should be holden of it." 

" But I cannot accept the Resurrection ! " 

Then you really mean that Christianity promises 
so much to Personality that it is incredible. At 
least then, what a personality this must have been 
that it seemed credible of Him. 

Moreover, Jesus is represented throughout the 
stories as showing a like power in overcoming other 
things that limit life, as a healer of the bodies, minds 
and spirits of men. He awakens new life in them. 

The sick, in one way or another, Jesus found on 
every hand. He is too great to despise such. It 
is the parvenu, not too sure of his own position, who 
insists so tremendously on the gap between himself 
and those beneath. The great spirit does not need 
that others should be merely " slaves and instru- 
ments " to hold it up. And Jesus had this further 
reason. He did not despise, because he could heal. 
" It is only those whom we do not despise that we 
are able to elevate. Moral contempt is a far greater 
indignity and insult than any kind of crime."* 

* Nietzsche. Will to Power, 740. 



34 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

This is not the place to argue for miracles, but 
there is enough contemporary evidence of remarkable 
acts of healing to put out of court the man who says 
that such things are not possible. The impression 
produced by the story is that of one possessing not, 
as is the case with most, too little or barely enough 
personality to meet the demands and possibilities 
of life for himself, but with such a reserve, such an 
overflow indeed, that in this presence others looked 
for healing and found it. That overflow of rich 
personality is what Christianity means by love. 
Love is a word so vilely treated and so reeking with 
sentimentalism that one hesitates to use it. When 
asked to define love it is well to remember that it 
depends upon the lover. The love of Jesus was the 
sign and bestowal of a rich personality. 

The works of healing are acts of love and faith, 
the latter also being dependent upon personality 
for its vitality. Other things being equal, the biggest 
man sees farthest and so, as Whitman has it, has most 
faith. Intensity of vision may stand for a definition 
of faith. 

The disciples saw the epileptic boy and heard 
the sad story afterwards told to Jesus, but they 
could not conjure up the picture of that boy restored to 
health. Jesus saw it, was able to make even the 
trembling father see it. And what by faith He saw, 
by love He made real. 

One more instance of healing from the fourth 
gospel. It may be history or parable or both. To 
the cripple in the arches of Bethesda Jesus said, 
" Wiliest thou to be made whole ? " 

It is indeed a parable this of human nature, desirous 
of life, impatient of things that limit, sure inwardly 
that these things should not be, yet not sure enough, 
hopeful always that some chance of freedom will 
come, waiting on a " miracle " from outside, and not 



THE HERO OF HEROES 35 

able to take advantage of it even if it should come. 
No doubt the poor fellow had received a lot of pity 
in his time, but no one had spoken to him in this way. 
He could but stammer, 

" Sir, I have no man . . ." 

But Jesus has already seen this man walking home 
with his bed. His personality overflows upon this 
weakling, bathes him in power, lifts him up. In 
the cripple's mind grows an idea. " I can ! " and 
he does. 

Whatever we may decide to think about the 
possibility of these things, they do give us the impres- 
sion Jesus made upon those who knew Him. He 
is the kind of person about whom such stories can 
fitly be told. They fall naturally into place in His 
life. There is no seeking after the dramatic, the 
prodigious or the terrifying. One has but to compare 
these stories with such miracles as are ascribed to 
the Hindu gods and sages, or with those attributed 
to Jesus in the apocryphal gospels, to see the gulf 
between them. Even the Old Testament miracles 
are, for the most part, on quite a different level. 
Jesus moves about quite simply and unaffectedly, 
and His works of mercy are done in the day's round, 
and with no idea of convincing men by any appeal 
to their sense of mystery. His appeal is in quite 
other directions. But, where He can find response 
in another personality, He can join forces with the 
faith of the other for healing. That He was so often 
able to create that faith in others is a tribute to His 
personality. There was that in Him as well as in 
His words which " spake with authority." 

This power is shown in other ways than in acts of 
healing. In the one act recorded of Jesus which 
can in any way be called an act of violence, the sur- 
prising part of the story seems to be little noticed. 
We see Him taking up the whip of rushes and driving 



36 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

the cattle and sheep out of the temple courts. We 
see the money lenders scrambling for their scattered 
coins. And we are so anxious to laugh at the picture 
— I dare say the crowd laughed, but not Jesus, — 
or either to apologise for His " righteous indignation" 
or point triumphantly to His " ill temper," that we 
forget to ask the question, " Why did they let Him do 
it ? " He was only one among a crowd. The only 
answer is that there was that in Jesus which held 
their hand. When His enemies at last did strike, 
what a picture of the business it was to take one 
poor man ! 

And He was poor, a nobody, so far as ordinary 
valuations go. It was naked and unaided personality 
that drew men about Him. The young man of great 
wealth, the Roman centurion, the ruler of the Jews 
and others are represented quite casually as seeking 
the help and counsel of this poor young man who 
was anybody's guest, and who was on terms of affec- 
tionate familiarity with the lowest characters of the 
country side. 

The tax gatherer who has piled up money finds Him 
such an irresistible puzzle that he is not above climbing 
a tree merely to get a good look at Him. Imagine 
some wealthy and well-known citizen of your own 
town climbing a lamp post to see a working man 
agitator go by ! But that is the kind of impression 
Jesus produced. And it is to be remembered that His 
public life was spread over three years at the most. 

Negatively, Jesus appears to be free from the 
weaknesses and trivialities which beset others, even 
the greatest. I am not arguing from what is left 
out of the story, but from the story as it stands. 
His absolute singleness of purpose is astonishing. 
Only those who have never sought to bend all their 
energies to one line can miss it. There is no division 
between self-culture and service, no sign of any 



THE HERO OF HEROES 37 

difficulty in settling what was due to Himself and what 
was due to others. Nor is there anything merely 
local or provincial. There is no reason to suppose 
that in many things He did not share the knowledge 
of His time, but He seems in no way to be limited by 
that. He did perfectly the thing He came to do. 
He can say at the end, " I have finished the work 
thou gavest me to do." 

Accept it broadly, as a human story. There 
has never been anything quite like it. Great personal- 
ities there have been who have affected those about 
them more by what they were than by anything that 
they did. It is said that Garibaldi produced such 
an impression on many people. Whitman also 
seems to have had a great unconscious power over 
those amongst whom he moved. When those who felt 
his influence most want to say the highest thing they 
can about him, they suggest that he was a second 
Jesus. But nobody has died for Whitman yet. 

What are we to think of it ? Make any allowance 
we wish for the growth of legend, accretions of the 
miraculous, exaggeration of story tellers and the 
like, and still the impression of a tremendous person- 
ality remains, the completest and most vital that 
has ever walked the earth. If there is anywhere 
a " divine word " of guidance on our great quest, 
this is the likeliest place to find it, the more so as 
we find that the task He set himself was the inter- 
preting and answering of our demand upon life. 
He deals with the very thing we are in search of. 

It is said sometimes that the last man to understand 
the principles and tendencies of his own work is the 
genius himself. He can create, but he cannot explain, 
and, when he tries to do so, makes a bungling job 
of it. Jesus might be a triumphant personality 
Himself, and yet so entirely have misread the meaning 
of His own life and spirit that His teaching, if carried 



38 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

out, would be subversive of life and, as has been said, 
a fatality. Indeed, the statement is made roundly 
that Christianity " denies life."* Nietzsche affirms 
this over many pages, in which his voice rises almost 
to a shriek. " Christianity is a degenerative move- 
ment, consisting of all kinds of decaying and 
excrement al elements." | He bids us hold our noses 
as we look into the dim cellar where the deadly 
Christian ideals are manufactured. J His followers 
support him, and even outdo him. Mr. J. M. Kennedy, 
in his book on Nietzsche, gives us scripture to prove 
this assertion, culminating in the alleged quotation 
from the words of Jesus, " He that loveth life shall 
lose it, and he that hateth life in this world shall keep 
it unto life eternal." Mr. Kennedy ought to be a 
little more exact in his quotations, especially when 
he is basing an attack upon them, for that is not what 
Jesus said. And, had he turned another page or so 
over, he would have found a more pregnant saying 
on the matter in dispute : "I am come that they 
might have life, and that they might have it more 
abundantly;" Here, at any rate, we find Jesus 
definitely ranged on the side of life. 

He was on the side of life in all He said, all He did, 
all He was. 

It is important that we should recognise the fact 
that all these go together. If the genius cannot 
explain himself it is a defect, or a limitation at the 
least. Jesus not only lived, but set out to teach 
men the secret of life. Conversely, Jesus not only 
taught, He is the practical example of what His teaching 
means. He is greater than His words, though He 
does not contradict them. He is not only the best 
commentary but the necessary commentary on what 
He said, a thing theologians, as well as others, have 

* Will to Power, 351. f Ibid, 154. 

X Genealogy of Morals, I., 14. 



THE HERO OF HEROES 39 

too frequently forgotten. The teaching of Jesus 
has been taken out of the story and held up as a 
thing apart, sometimes for our admiration, as in the 
case of Tolstoy, sometimes for our rejection, as in 
the case of Nietzsche, sometimes merely to be watered 
down and made palatable by pious commentators 
who, while they did not hesitate to ascribe deity to 
Jesus, yet thought they knew the possibilities of life 
better than He did. 

The life of Tolstoy, to whom the world owes so 
much, makes sad reading at times, most of all when 
we see that last pitiful attempt to clear himself of 
the web of compromise that ever seemed to choke 
his search for the good. The impression left on the 
mind is, that if this is Christianity, it is a pathetic 
failure under ordinary conditions of life. Is not 
the reason just this, that Tolstoy took the letter of 
the words of Jesus as being the whole of His message? 

Nietzsche, when he could for a moment see past 
■' that pernicious blockhead, Paul," found a figure 
which commanded his respect, but it is clear that 
he did not read the words of Jesus in the light of His 
personality or think such a course to be at all necessary. 

Yet there is no other reasonable way, not because 
what Jesus said is not true, or because His life denies 
or refutes it, but simply because Jesus did not set 
out to lay down a f 00] -proof system, with carefully 
denned terms and the verbal exactness of a philosopher. 
He was not making a new " law," which in itself 
shows the value He set upon Personality and His 
desire for its free and full development. He cut 
the leading strings and would have men act from within. 
He had a profound faith in human possibilities, but 
found them overlaid and smothered. His aim was 
not so much to convince the mind as to quicken 
the spirit. He awakes the dead and gives the word, 
M Loose him and let him go ! " 



40 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

Jesus spoke about the greatest things in parables 
and pictures such as would strike the imagination. 
Where there were meanings hidden, it was because 
words would not stretch to them. The tree is hidden 
in the seed, but it will appear in due time if the soil 
be kindly. All the more reason to know the speaker, 
if this was His method. A phrase from the lips of a 
stranger that leaves us cold may be startling enough 
from a known friend, or it may be the other way about. 

What we have to do then, if the personality of Jesus 
makes any appeal to us, is first of all to see if we can 
discover what it was which made Jesus the powerful 
and overflowing personality He was, and whether 
His secret is at all available for us. 



CHAPTER IV 

SONS OF GOD 

"It is our claim that this life had significance for the right inter- 
pretation of human personality. . . . It is the revelation 
of what lies behind our humanity, the solution of what disturbs 
us so mightily, and it was intended to found a new race on a new 
conception of human nature." — Dr. Orchard. 

When we look at Jesus again with regard to our 
last questions, we see that what most distinguishes 
Him from those amongst whom He moves is the vivid- 
ness of His apprehension of God. He never argues 
the point or explains it. That God was His Father, 
that He was able to be sure of His will, was not to Him 
a matter of report or of argument. God was present 
to His consciousness in such wise that He had no 
doubt about it whatever. In His teaching He seems 
to assume that what, in this respect, is true of Himself 
is true of others, or may be, if they will recognise it. 
It only needs pointing out, and at once men will, 
with a glad surprise, set about doing what the Father 
does. 

Now one would think that this would be good news 
to men, unless it be true, as I think Mr. G. K. 
Chesterton has said, that men cannot bear to be 
reminded that they are sons of God. It ought at 
any rate to be good news to us who are seeking the way 
to Personality, and have already found that we 
cannot explain that growing thing in us, except 
by supposing that it is itself an expression of the 
Creative Will, and that its final achievement is the 



42 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

end of the creative process. Good news it is, surely, 
if, the completest expression of Personality that the 
world has been was due to a more perfect realisation 
of something which we see to be the truth about 
ourselves. And if it were not the truth about our- 
selves, we should hardly be able to see it as the truth 
about Jesus. 

All that remains then is that I should live like a 
son of God ! 

Truly, that is all. It is the whole secret, just 
as the secret of painting masterpieces is merely the 
choosing of the right colours and putting them in 
the right place. It is here that we find the gap between 
knowing that a thing is so as a fact of the mind and 
realising that it is so as a fact of the consciousness. 
Then there is the further difficulty of implicitly 
obeying what the awakened consciousness suggests. 
It is much like the difference between the appreciator 
and the creator of beauty. Our only hope is that 
somehow Jesus will be able to bridge this gap for us. 
At all events, He knew. How He came to know we 
are not told. That there was some development 
in His knowledge is suggested, but from the beginning 
He is set before us as sure that He knew the Father. 
To say that He was deluded is to condemn ourselves 
to life in a world where delusion can produce not only 
more powerful, but more lasting and more life-giving 
effects than sanity. Bad as the world may be, I 
am not prepared to believe that about it. 

We have reached a point at which I must make 
a digression. We must settle the question as to how 
we are going to regard the " supernatural." We 
cannot look at the story of Jesus without seeing what 
a great part this plays in it. The miracles of healing 
have already been referred to. They are sometimes 
explained as being mere cases of mental healing, 
though just how that explains them is difficult to 



SONS OF GOD 43 

see. We must be clear as to what we mean by the 
"supernatural." There are many who are quite 
ready to take Jesus as the one sufficient guide to life, 
but they have decided against the possible appear- 
ance of the supernatural in the order with which we 
have to do. Man is the child of nature, and natural 
laws are uniform and changeless. 

Now I am quite clear that what we call the 
" supernatural," cannot be left out of the life of 
Jesus, for I have tried to do it. My first aim in 
writing this book was to show that the teaching of 
Jesus about life represented the wisest, the surest, 
and finally, the only successful way of achieving 
Personality. I would merely argue from the teaching 
to the type of personality which obedience to it 
would result in. It was to be a simple tract on common 
sense ethics. Does not Nietzsche tell us, " Christian- 
ity is still possible at any moment. It is not bound 
to any one of the impudent dogmas that have adorned 
themselves with its name. Christianity is a method 
of life, not a system of belief."* There is very much 
truth in that, though it depends upon which impudent 
dogmas one means. But, to cut the story short, 
I got along on my proposed method, with considerable 
difficulties here and there, until I had written the 
greater part of what I had set out to say. Then the 
whole thing broke down, finally and irretrievably 
broke down. It was not the miracles that broke 
it down. It was Jesus Himself. I turned back to 
see that the teaching of Jesus about conduct is as 
much interwoven with His idea of the supernatural — 
not necessarily with mine — as the stories of the 
miracles. I had to begin again. 

A little reflection shows where the mistake lies. 
We look to Jesus as the personality beyond all others. 
That means, we find a consciousness of union with 

* Will to Power, 212. 



44 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

God beyond that of others. If that is anything 
more than a pious phrase, it means that Jesus will 
express in a way beyond others something of the 
Creative Will, or the Life Force, or whatever we 
choose to call the power behind phenomena. Have 
we acquired the right to say what that will mean 
in practice ? Only one thing can give us that right, 
that is equality of personality, equality of conscious- 
ness of our union with the Creative Will. We see 
Jesus was conscious of such union; we expect Him 
to show us in His personality what that means, but 
then we go on to assume that He must show us what 
we think it means. Surely it is only reasonable 
to say that what Jesus finds it to mean is the 
important thing. We shall never learn if we assume 
that we know already, or that our knowledge of the 
nature of things is exhaustive. Instead of setting 
up our idea of God and of what is possible to 
Personality and then cutting Jesus down to fit, would 
it not be wiser to revise our ideas of God and of 
Personality ? I think so. 

It seems clear that Jesus was aware of and used 
resources beyond ordinary experience, but the miracles 
are only one way in which He did that. His whole 
teaching is based on the idea that, because men were 
sons of God, resources of another order than the 
" natural " were open to them, and that by these 
their personalities might be immeasurably enriched. 
Why should we assume, as we so often do, that there 
are yet boundless advances possible in the natural 
order, but none in the realm of Personality, which 
is the spiritual order ? The Personality of Jesus is 
our assurance that there are new possibilities there. 
What other kind of assurance could we have ? This 
is not to argue for all the miracles in the lump, or 
for any particular miracle. The evidence for each 
one must be judged on its merits. But it is to say 



SONS OF GOD 45 

that we have no right to consider that the last word 
has been said when we declare for the uniformity 
of nature, meaning the nature that we have had 
experience of through our physical senses, and decide 
that no higher modes of action are possible. The 
super-natural is not the unnatural, nor the contra- 
natural, nor the lawless, but just literally the super- 
natural. We are ourselves a compound of the natural 
and the supernatural. That is why we fit the 
world indifferently. We are too big. Our difficulty is 
that of the angel in Mr. H. G. Wells' The Wonderful 
Visit, — to get our wings tucked away under the 
habiliments of ordinary or natural life. 

The message of Jesus was that what we call the 
supernatural is already in our possession and awaits 
our further claims upon it. " Supernatural " is our 
word, not His. He spoke of His works as signs, as 
hints that the wise would take. We shall come 
to this again as we go on to consider the end that 
Jesus set before men, but this digression was necessary 
here that we might be clear as to where we stand. 

We go back then to the point at which we broke 
off, the fact that Jesus knew God and was in union 
with Him, that this consciousness was no series of 
gleams, but a steady light, burning and shining, in 
which He continually walked. It may be that what 
Jesus found in His consciousness we may find in ours 
if we look, that the difference between Him and us 
is mainly, if not altogether, that He recognised as 
the presence and voice of God and wholly trusted 
to what we have felt and not recognised or not trusted, 
or perhaps have fled from lest it should arise and 
command our whole life and perhaps lead us out 
into an adventure to which we fear to commit our- 
selves. We know that we could not only do more, 
but be more, if we dare. Certainly Jesus spoke to 
men as if they had some sure knowledge of God in 



46 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

themselves. " If ye . . . how much more your 
heavenly Father." One is finite and stained with 
evil, the other infinite and perfect, but if we find that 
something in God is also in ourselves, we have found 
the presence of God, if we will but recognise it. Jesus 
told men to trust the Father, to live as sons of the 
Father, He rallied them on the smallness of their 
faith, and some few He led into a greater trust, a nearer 
realisation than they had dreamed of as possible. 
Yet it remains true that He found no faith like His own, 
no such clear and untroubled consciousness, no such 
glad obedience. It would seem that He had come 
to this conclusion before He appeared as a teacher, 
and that it was the lack of such vision on the part 
of others which at last brought Him to the conclusion 
that He was not only a son of God, but the Son of God, 
the Christ whom His people had long looked for, the 
Divine Man who should be a deliverer to His race. 

The creeds have gone farther than this, as we 
know. They speak of God the Son, Very God of Very 
God. I do not in the least dispute their finding. 
But there is little in the story of Jesus to suggest 
that He was conscious of being God the Son, nor, if 
we accept the verdict of faith about Him, do we need 
to hold that He was different in "substance" to our- 
selves. I cannot myself easily attach any intelligible 
meaning to the idea of a difference in substance. 
It is a term belonging to past ways of thinking. Jesus 
stands immeasurably above us, the supreme embodi- 
ment of the Creative Will in a human personality, 
but the presence of God in Him cannot be essentially 
different from His presence in other human personalities. 
To evoke it in others was His mission. William 
Law tells us, " If Christ was to raise a new life like 
His own in every man, then every man must have had 
originally, in the inmost spirit of his life, a seed of 
Christ." 



SONS OF GOD 47 

We have agreed that the full development of 
Personalities is the end of the creative purpose and 
process. Paul tells us the same thing in different 
terms. " The earnest expectation of the creation 
waiteth for the revealing of the sons of God." 

If God can unite with a human personality, there 
must be in Him something corresponding to humanity 
and something in us corresponding to divinity. There 
is no other reasonable explanation of what Personality 
means. We are, as it has been put, the first step 
from the animal to the divine. Only the first step, 
but still, the first step has been taken. That is 
something to lift up the heart with the joy of being 
alive. " We have positively appeared ! " 

How Jesus dealt with the likeness and the difference 
He found between Himself and others we must now 
consider. 



CHAPTER V 

THE SON OF MAN 

" No man can resist himself, the pursuit of his own interests, 
of his own idea ; can resist the coming of the Son of Man, of the 
true Superman who is Lord over the Self." — Robert Gardner. 

Jesus found that He stood alone in His consciousness 
of union with God, so much so, that He accepted 
as His mission the work of revealing the Father to 
men. To bring men up to His level of vision, into 
the divine way of life befitting sons of God, was a 
great and worthy task. It was enough that the 
disciple should become as his master. 

Is it finally enough ? We have been told that 
there is little hope for us if we are finally satisfied 
with Jesus. Did He not live the life of a provincial 
Jew, a long while ago ? However universal His appeal 
may be, His actual life was lived in a smaller world 
than ours, smaller in size, smaller in the reach and 
complexity of its activities. There are those, for 
example, to whom art is everything, their meat and 
drink. What did Jesus know of art ? Or of litera- 
ture, statecraft, or science ? What conception could 
He have of the way in which invention and discovery 
were to enlarge the scope of life and the field in which 
Personality was to find expression ? Granting that 
His consciousness of God set Him immeasurably 
above others of His time, and even above us, not was 
the limited, simple life a necessity for such conscious- 
ness to be possible ? Was not its intensity due to 
its narrowness ? Would the same consciousness have 

4 8 



THE SON OF MAN 49 

equal validity in our day and in our complex life ? 
Does Jesus represent the final possibility, and if He 
does, shall we not have to conclude that all our 
activities, beyond such as He engaged in, are but 
a vain attempt to build a new tower of Babel ? Have 
they no real meaning for life and Personality at 
aJl ? We feel that they have, or at least ought to have. 
How then can Jesus be a sufficient guide or a worthy 
ideal, seeing there are so many issues He never dealt 
with ? 

Doubts to the world's child heart unknown 
Question us now from star and stone ; 
The power is lost to self -deceive 
With hollow forms of make-believe ; 
Still struggles in the age's breast, 
With deepening agony of quest, 
The old enquiry, " Art Thou He ? "* 

Let us, we might reasonably conclude, cease looking 
back. We must be forward lookers — forward to that 
dim all-conquering figure of the future, the Messiah 
yet to come, the Superman ! 

We might so conclude, as some have done, if we 
did not look a little more deeply. Then we find that 
we have taken rather too much for granted. Can 
we take it for granted that the man who rides an 
aeroplane is essentially different from his ancestor 
who rode an ass, or even that our varied knowledge 
and complex activities have really enlarged our 
personalities ? No doubt they have increased the 
field of activity for them, but that is another matter. 
Is not a great part of our modern troubles due to the 
fact that, in vulgar slang, we have bitten off more 
than we can chew ? At any point in the progress of 
man, the most important thing is that he should 
be in touch with God. Jesus made it His mission 
to lead men to that. It is final. 

* Whittier ; The Meeting. 



50 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

Then we may have forgotten that, since the person- 
ality even more than the words of Jesus is to be 
our guide, it does not follow that because He did not 
mention some of our problems, say those pertaining 
to modern industrial conditions, He can shed no light 
upon them. He said nothing about slavery, but 
He killed it, and if it was a long time dying, it was 
only because there is no element of coercion about 
what Jesus shows us. We accept or reject at our 
will, but we come to His solution at the end. 

And, on the other side, there is nothing in all that 
Jesus said or did which is opposed to the widest 
exercise of every human gift or the continual conquest 
of the material world, and, on the Christian inter- 
pretation of Jesus, everything to encourage us. 

It is to be noticed also that Jesus Himself looked 
forward and bade us look forward beyond the limita- 
tions under which He found Himself to a time when 
they should be transcended. We are not to look 
back to Jesus in the flesh as the final measure of human 
possibility in all the details of life. It is not the 
imitation of Jesus that is our business, but the 
application of His Spirit to the life and problems of 
our own day. It is part of His greatness that He refused 
to be "a judge and divider over men," and con- 
sistently refrained from laying down rules which 
would have been of local and temporary application. 
We look back to Jesus to take our bearings. We 
look back as the student continually refers back 
to the principles and axioms with which he started. 
We find in Jesus, in His attitude to the Father, in 
His revelation of the Father, the true way of life in 
all circumstances, however complex, but we also 
look forward, as He looked forward, to the final 
revelation, the ultimate victory of the Son of Man, 
beside whom the Nietzschean Superman is but a pale 
ghost. 



THE SON OF MAN 51 

Who is this Son of Man ? 

Superman is but a new name for a very old idea — 
like most of Nietzsche's discoveries. I am not making 
the mistake which Mr. Bernard Shaw found so galling 
in relation to his play, Man and Superman. I am 
not thinking of the ethical Superman, the " just 
man made perfect," but of a vastly greater figure, 
dimly appearing in the prophetic dreams of the 
Hebrew scriptures, the brooding over which no doubt 
suggested to Jesus the name which He so commonly 
uses, apparently of Himself. 

Apparently, for that is a question. Was Jesus 
speaking of Himself when He named the Son of Man? 
If of Himself, was it of Himself as an individual merely, 
or in some representative way, as a man might speak 
for the firm which employs him ? 

It is likely that Jesus took not only the title, but 
something of the content He put into it, from phrases 
and hints He found in the reading of the Jewish 
scriptures and in other more nearly contemporary 
writings, of which the Book of Enoch is a type. In 
that book the Son of Man appears as the expected 
deliverer of His people. This is not so in the canonical 
writings, though the hints of it are there. But in the 
Scriptures proper, Jesus found the idea of man as 
created for dominion over all creation, but alas, 
too often appearing in practice as the slave, and not 
the master, of things and circumstances, " bound, 
who should conquer; slaves, who should be kings." 
Amid the pictures which alternate between sorrow 
over things as they are and rapture over what might 
be, nay, must be, if God rules, there appears a figure, 
now seemingly a man who shall be like " the shadow 
of a great rock in a weary land," now as something 
more than an individual man, an ideal race, now as 
one who takes upon himself the burden of a bewildered 
people and by his sufferings redeems them. 



52 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

The ideas left on the mind might be phrased, 
" Nothing is too good to be true of man, if only we 
had the right Man to show us the way." Desire, 
mingled with hope and promise, glows and fades and 
glows again as we read. God will somehow express 
Himself in a Man, and then all will be well. But 
such a Man, the Messiah, the Christ, the Chosen 
One, will have to be of a type far beyond the specimens 
of His race which have hitherto appeared. He will 
be Superman, at least. 

" Such a man would be, in the very truest sense, 
the son of the race in its most normal racial working, 
the pattern of mankind, the fruit of all effort after 
right, the vindication of the instinctive belief in its 
possibility — in the very highest sense the Son of 
Mao."* 

Was this the place that Jesus, finding Himself unique 
in His consciousness of the Father, decided He must 
occupy ? It is clear that it was so, but there are 
varying interpretations of His use of this title which 
are held to be contradictory of each other. They 
may be summed up as follows. 

" Son of Man " means : 
I, myself. 
Man generally. 

Ideal Man : Typical Man : Representative Man. 
Messiah, present or to come. 

These interpretations can all find sayings to support 
them, but none of them cover all the cases in which 
Jesus used the phrase. If I may venture an opinion 
where doctors differ, it is that all these interpretations 
represent bits of the truth about the consciousness 
of Jesus. 

He was speaking for Himself when He used the title, 
Son of Man, but not aboutHimself alone and separate. 
Personality to Jesus was certainly not " that self- 

* Voluntas Dei, 102. 



THE SON OF MAN 53 

hood which shuts itself up against everything else." 
So much personality came into consciousness in Him 
that He was able to reach down to that depth — or 
up to that height — where our personality is in union 
with something altogether vaster, the ground of all 
personalities. He drew His life from that, and was 
able not only to show to the world the greatest 
personality it has known, but to speak for man in a 
universal way. 

He speaks for that Man in men who, He believed, 
is the image of God, the Messiah, the Christ, " the 
Real Self of every being growing into consciousness 
through the life and struggle of the race."* 

The fourth gospel puts it that Jesus was the fullest 
expression possible under human limitations of the 
eternal thought of God, of the light that lighteth 
every man. In the terms we have been using, the 
fullest expression of complete human personality 
and the prophecy of all that might be. For the Son 
of Man has yet to be fully revealed and to triumph 
over all those sub-human powers which are yet so 
manifest in ourselves and find their expression in the 
evils that beset us. The writer of the letter to the 
Hebrews reminds us of the statement in the eighth 
Psalm, which tells that man was created to have 
dominion, and he goes on : — " We see not yet all 
things under dominion to him, but we see . . . 
Jesus, . . . crowned with glory and honour," 
the assurance to all men, that is, of the dominion 
for which they were created. 

We conclude, then, that in calling Himself the Son 
of Man, Jesus was speaking in a symbolical way of 
that which He found in Himself and saw to be 
universal, the final truth about all men. But it was 
so completely and uniquely present in His own case 
that He could identify Himself with it. There was no 

* Robert Gardner : In the Heart of Democracy. 



54 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

division between Jesus and the Christ. From hence- 
forth He is Jesus Christ, the New Adam, the incarnate 
presence of God in our race, the symbol of the Christ 
within us, of our true Personality. He reveals God 
to me, but He is also " the Interpreter of myself 
to myself." 



CHAPTER VI 

THE CHRISTIAN END 

" If one is clear as to the ' wherefore ' of one's 
life," says Nietzsche, " then the ' how ' can take 
care of itself." When we ask for Nietzsche's " where- 
fore " his followers point us to the Superman, but 
Nietzsche himself looked beyond him, and gives us 
for our final vision his doctrine of Eternal Recurrence, 
which immediately negatives any value his " yea- 
saying " to life may have had. Its utter hopelessness 
may be left to the imagination. Even Nietzsche's 
adulators find themselves in difficulty over it. That 
there is finally no progress at all, that all the 
tragedies of the earth and the unnameable torments 
men have inflicted upon one another are to recur 
again eternally, is the last word of despair. No 
wonder if the " horror of his teaching, "as Mr. Kennedy 
puts it, had much to do with Nietzsche's final madness. 

In contrast, Christianity, which we are told denies 
life, looks for the eternal and ever progressive life 
of the Kingdom of God. 

Jesus did not invent the phrase, but He made it 
the ground of His message to men. He set before 
them an end which in their hearts they all wanted, 
making a positive appeal to those deep impulses in 
men which He believed to be the voice of God. 
Response to that appeal is a " yea-saying " to the 
Will to Personality. 

Jesus found the phrase in use as the brief summary 
of that perfect commonwealth which is the constantly 

55 



56 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

recurring dream of the Hebrew prophets, now as 
ideal state, now as the ideal Jerusalem, now as life 
under the ideal king. It meant an end of the things 
that thwart and cripple men's lives and, on the 
positive side, a life of joyous fulness. In a word, 
Utopia, conceived, as we might expect, under Hebrew 
forms and expressed in Hebrew phrases. 

But are not Utopias the refuge of the impotent 
and despairing ? Hardly so. Neither the impotent 
nor despairing are given to set out for themselves 
a picture which means progress to a great end. 
Utopias are mostly the work of people of constructive 
powers who, by the dulness or apathy of men, are 
hindered in their work. In any case, it is not a 
Hebrew dream only, it is a race dream, this of the 
perfect world order in which all lives have free scope 
for expression and growth. That the Jews called 
their dream the Kingdom of God witnesses to the 
greatness of their conception of God. 

Now in speaking of the Kingdom of God, Jesus 
must have meant some such thing as the prophets 
had meant and the people to whom He addressed 
Himself understood by that term. Otherwise there 
was no point in His using it at all. This needs some 
emphasis, as it has been thought that Jesus meant 
something entirely different from those to whom He 
spoke, and it was this which created the misunder- 
standing that finally proved fatal. This " something 
different " has been held to comprise the real message 
of Jesus, a message of quietism, of escape from the 
world, of a kingdom altogether inward, and, too often, 
a little haven of refuge into which the soul could 
creep and be safe. It is just that type of Christianity 
which deserves — if any does — some of the scorn which 
Nietzsche poured upon Christianity in general, and 
it is to be noted that this was Nietzsche's own inter- 
pretation of the Kingdom of God. " The Kingdom 



THE CHRISTIAN END 57 

of Heaven is a state of the heart. ... a change 
of feeling in the individual."* 

This is by no means all that Jesus meant. We shall 
see that it is not only reasonable but quite correct 
to assume that Jesus spoke to be understood, and 
did not mean any less than the people understood, 
though it is not unlikely that He meant much more, 
since the idea moved Him as it had moved none else. 

What was the Kingdom of God to Jesus ? We do 
not want a definition of the phrase, but the ideas 
for which it stood. Had Jesus appeared in our 
own day it is possible that He would have chosen 
some quite different figure to express His meaning. 
He took the best at His disposal, recognising its 
limitations. Such sayings as " My kingdom is not 
of this world," do not mean that what He stood for 
had no relation to this world, but that, as the world 
counted kingdoms, His was not a kingdom at all, 
for it did not depend on those things without which 
they could not exist. It is a spiritual order. 

In that sense, also, it is not an " external " kingdom, 
but as it is the realisation of the life which is God's 
intention for men, it is obvious that no external 
thing will be unaffected by it. Environment is the 
expression of Personality and faithfully reflects it. 
The Kingdom is ultimately the complete transforma- 
tion of life by the elimination of all that hinders it, 
and its full development to — " it doth not yet appear 
what we shall be." 

There is another error which must be noted. An 
antithesis between " this world " and the " other 
world," between " this life and eternity " has been 
created in some Christian teaching which does not 
exist in the thought of Jesus. That anyone should 
be advised, as we sometimes have been, to cease 
thinking of this life and to devote the attention to 

* Will to Power, 161. 



58 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

eternity, is merely silly, since this life is as much a 
part of eternity as any other. " One life at a time," is 
a motto to which I think Jesus would not have 
objected. And the common idea in the contrast 
between " this world " and the " world to come " 
is largely due to imperfect translation. Jesus said 
literally, " this age " and " the age to come." There 
is no necessary reference to any other part of space 
than that which we at present occupy. To use a 
wise distinction made by Professor Hogg,* we are 
to be " unworldly," but by no means " other- 
worldly." What Jesus thought was the lot of those 
who laid down this earthly life is another question, 
but the prayer He taught His disciples hinges on 
the words, " Thy kingdom come ... on earth." 

What good things did He include in this ? Speaking 
to men for whom the phrase had vivid meaning, He 
did not need to indulge in description. We gather 
his idea from what He did and the significance He 
attached to His doings. He healed men, their broken 
bodies, their crushed spirits, their discordant personal- 
ities. That sums up His work as He went to and 
from Galilee and Judaea. He did not work miracles 
to convince unbelievers, but refused to do so. He 
did, however, consider that His works were signs 
which the wise should notice, and from which they 
might gather that the good thing they desired was 
possible and awaited their united willingness. Signs 
as sure as the budding leaf is the sign and promise 
of summer. 

It is quite clear from the whole attitude of Jesus 
towards sin, mental disarrangement and disease 
that He thought of these things as definitely evil, 
as things to be overcome. Why evil ? Because they 
stand in the way of that fulness of life and complete 
Personality which is the birthright of man as the child 

* Christ's Message of the Kingdom. 



THE CHRISTIAN END 59 

of God. The Kingdom of God is the inheritance 
of that birthright. 

The perfect order waits on the willingness of 
men. It is the gift of God, as the Jews believed, but, 
as they did not realise, it is still dependent upon 
man, on His willingness to take the right way, to put 
His gifts to the right use. For God coerces none. 
To those who thought that " the Kingdom of God 
was immediately to appear," Jesus told the story 
of the pounds. The man who reckoned the con- 
ditions hard, who did not see why He should labour 
for another or live for any but self, is the failure 
of the story. The way to fullest life is not by hoard- 
ing, but by spending, not by hiding the pound in a 
napkin, but by letting it circulate. 

Mr. H. G. Wells, in A Modern Utopia, emphasises 
the distinction between what he calls the static and 
the dynamic conceptions of the perfect community. 
One is a flat perfection in which change can only 
be for the worse. The other leaves room for growth. 
It need hardly be said that the Kingdom of God is 
of the dynamic order. Its establishment on earth 
is but the beginning, for we have no reason to suppose 
that its reach is bounded by the life of the body, 
or that those who live for its realisation and leave 
the body before that day — as most of us probably 
will — are shut out from its joys. Perhaps, as Sir 
Oliver Lodge suggests, we go upstairs to rule a planet ! 
If that be so, the Kingdom of God will reach there 
also. 

But now let it be said with equal emphasis that the 
Kingdom of God is an inward Kingdom, and a present 
possession for those who unite themselves with the 
Will of God. That was the experience of Jesus, 
an experience which He is able to communicate to 
others. He showed men in Himself and in His 
teaching that since that perfect order does not await 



60 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

the willingness of God, but only the readiness of men, 
its powers are to some extent manifest and realisable 
now in human personalities. Not the perfect kingdom, 
for all that it means will take all men to know and 
show, but there is now possible for men a fulness 
of life and an enrichment of Personality which is the 
promise of a life eternal, in which every possibility 
shall have room to develop as the Kingdom of God 
is more and more completely realised. Eternal 
life is not merely the endless prolongation of existence, 
but existence of such a quality that it cannot be 
destroyed. It is the true personal life, which will 
survive the assault of death upon the body as that 
of Jesus did. "Eternal Life and Kingdom of God are 
names for the same idea, the former expressing it in 
terms of personal possession, and the latter in terms 
of the thing possessed,"* and, it may be added, of 
the order in which it finds expression. 

The Kingdom of God then, is yet to come, but 
its powers and possibilities may be entered upon now, 
just as Jesus was at once Son of Man in His conscious- 
ness of God, and yet looked forward to a final victory 
of the Son of Man which should be our victory too. 
One makes the other possible. An order imposed 
upon men from without would be a misfit. A purely 
inward order in which there was no hope for the 
world as such would be the handing over of the world 
to the forces of destruction. The way of Jesus avoids 
both those fatalities. 

Immovably certain that God was His Father, 
He claimed sonship on behalf of all, and with it the 
world order and fulness of life and Personality that 
such sonship demands. His teaching about the 
conduct of life is a setting forth of those values which 
make for and express this type of life, and will finally 
realise it in the Kingdom of God. 

* Hogg : Christ's Message of the Kingdom. 



PART II 
THE CHRISTIAN TYPE 

"Are Christian morals worth anything, or are they a profanation 
and an outrage ? " — Nietzsche. 

"Christianity was the first expression of world religion, the first 
complete repudiation of tribalism and war and disputation. The 
common sense of mankind has toiled through two thousand years 
of chastening experience to find at last how sound a meaning attaches 
to the familiar phrases of the Christian faith." — H. G. Wells. 



CHAPTER I 

THE BEATITUDES 

The Sermon on the Mount is our main statement 
of Christian values, so far as the teaching of Jesus 
goes. We must be clear, however, from the commence- 
ment, that it is not a manual of rules. It is very 
unlikely that it represents a single discourse. It is 
a compilation of aphorisms and counsels which seem 
to have been given as occasion demanded, though one 
or more brief discourses may form the backbone of it. 

Jesus did not give such detailed instruction in 
behaviour as John the Baptist is represented as 
giving to the soldiers and publicans at their request. 
Rather He emphasises the spirit in which life is to be 
lived, sometimes positively, sometimes negatively 
as need arose. But Christian morality is not " nega- 
tive morality," and so far as morality means the 
keeping of rules, it is not morality at all. There 
is nothing in the teaching of Jesus in the style of 
those who would " draw a line and make other chaps 
toe it." 

On the other hand, there is nothing abstract about 
what Jesus has to say. He never tells us vaguely 
to do the right or try to be good, though I have heard 
it said that the sum of all Jesus has to say is, " Be 
good." Which is not true. He was asked once to 
name a " good " thing that an enquirer might do it. 
We remember his reply : — 

" Why askest thou Me concerning that which is 
good ? " 

63 



64 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

The fact is, Jesus does not reach His values by the 
way of morality at all. He set out to establish neither 
a code nor a cult. His method is much more personal 
and searching. 

Augustine said that the sum of Christian teaching 
is, " Love God, and do as you like." He came much 
nearer to the truth than the author of " Be good." 

"Jesus said to His Jews : The law was for servants ; 
love God as I love Him, as His Son ! What have we 
Sons of God to do with morals." * 

It is possible that Nietzsche imagines he is here 
quoting Jesus against Christianity, but it is not so. 
That we are not saved by " works," that a correct 
moral life, described picturesquely as the "filthy 
rags of our own righteousness," is of no avail, is just 
what may be heard in any conventicle. Salvation 
is a matter of personal relationship to God, even 
among those whose idea of the Christian life seems 
narrowest. Possibly Protestantism, Nietzsche's bete 
noir, had no representatives more generally considered 
to be the enemies of life than the Puritans. Yet 
it is the Puritan Bunyan who pictures Mr. Legality, 
of the village of Morality, as one of those inefficient 
busy-bodies who fail to put the pilgrim on to the way 
of life. 

Neither does Jesus appeal to our sense of duty 
as the final guide for us. Men have done evil 
things that their nature revolted at from a sense 
of " duty." 

In the one picture of the final judgment which 
Jesus draws for us, those who are condemned were 
possibly moral enough, as morality is generally con- 
ceived. They sound sufficiently apologetic. And 
they claim that they have been ready to do their 
duty. But they had not discerned the Son of Man 
among the sons of men. Separatists, these, who 

* Beyond Good and Evil, 164. 



THE BEATITUDES 65 

thought that people who were lowly, unfortunate 
or " physiologically blotched " did not matter. 

We find the key to the ethical teaching of Jesus in 
these words : " That ye may be the sons of your Father." 
All that Jesus had to say about conduct springs from 
that. It springs, that is, from His conception of human 
Personality. As we have already seen, our true 
life is that of sons of God. He appeals therefore 
to those deep impulses within us which He recognises 
as carrying with them their own sanction. He bids 
us trust them as the voice of God in us and as the 
way of life. 

Jesus, in His own words, did nothing but what 
He saw the Father do, and if He points out a way 
of life as having value for us, it is because He sees 
it to be the divine way of reaching the divine end. 
If He is right in that judgment, then His way is the 
only one which can ultimately succeed. He inter- 
preted that way for all men to see, believing that 
when they saw it they would recognise it as answering 
to something in themselves. Men do recognise 
it, sometimes with longing, sometimes with fear, 
sometimes with hatred, sometimes with faith, and 
that is why, despite all the failures of the Church, 
and of those who have professed to follow Jesus, 
He still speaks to the consciousness of men to-day. 

The Beatitudes, with which the fifth chapter of 
Matthew opens, contain the main characteristics 
of the man who is to make possible the Kingdom 
of God. It is important to note that they all belong 
to the same man. We must remember that through- 
out, since much criticism is based on the idea that, 
in the case of meekness, let us say, Jesus had in view 
some person of whom the only thing that can be 
said is that he is meek. That is not so at all. We 
shall consider these values separately, but our verdict 
must be given on the complete man. 



66 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

The remainder of the Sermon on the Mount and 
other similar teaching may be said to represent the 
Man of the Beatitudes in action, as he faces the 
inevitable problems of daily life. Jesus says, in effect, 
I have shown you the new man, the son of the Father. 
Let me show you in these examples, how this God- 
like person will behave. 

Necessarily examples cannot be unlimited. 
Necessarily men will have to face problems which 
are, in form at least, new. But after all, we need not 
be astonished to find that sons of the Father need 
to think for themselves. 

Many of the examples and counsels which we find 
in these chapters have been put there by the compiler 
without regard to the circumstances under which 
they were given. In some cases we can find the event 
which produced the counsel in the other gospels, 
but in other cases we cannot, and as in dealing with 
human life practically every case is an exception 
in some way, we can see that to take the picturesque 
phrases and figures of Jesus as rigid rules, to be held 
to by the letter, may not be the best way to fulfil 
the mind of Jesus. We must interpret the words 
of Jesus by Jesus Himself, in whom we shall find 
them exemplified. 

It should be clear also that to take the words of 
Jesus by the letter and to obey them as mere rules 
is not the way to act as a son of the Father. Men 
are not sons of God because they do such and such 
things. They do these things because they are 
sons of God, which is a different matter. The virtues 
of the Sermon on the Mount are virtues for the sons 
of God. Others try them at their peril. For while 
it is true that God is Father to all men, not all men 
are sons of the Father, though it is always open to 
them to become so. This is a paradoxical way of 
putting it, but the meaning, I think, is obvious. One 



THE BEATITUDES 67 

might put it in another way by saying that we cannot 
be sons of the Father on and off, when we chance to 
think of the matter, or in some activities of our 
life only, or when we are in a quandary and can see 
no other way out. The choice of this way must be 
the choice of the whole personality, freely made, 
and for life as a whole. It must be a conviction 
to which we do, to the best of our knowledge and 
power, absolutely commit ourselves. Jesus promises 
nothing whatever to anything less than that, but He 
gives out of His own experience an assurance of 
blessedness to those who do so consecrate themselves. 

About blessedness a word must be said. Jesus 
does not set this state up as the end to be aimed at. 
He does not appeal to the desire for happiness. 
Blessedness is the accompanying state of those who, 
having chosen the Kingdom of God for their end, 
exhibit the characteristics which will make that end 
possible. They are blessed because they have chosen 
the right means to a good end, — because they will 
gain their end. 

Yet it remains quite true to say that Christianity 
is a religion of blessedness, and that the Christian 
life is marked by an inward joy and peace which 
has often been the wonder of men. The New Testa- 
ment is full of the spirit of joy as a present experience. 
The picture sometimes drawn for us of the Christian 
life as a meagre, narrow life of which the moving 
spirit is resentment, a kind of gloomy cellar in which 
men spend their time alternately bemoaning their 
own lot, envying the great whose power they affect 
to despise, and gloating over the joy that is to be 
theirs in the future when positions shall be reversed, 
is simply ludicrous in its falseness to the facts. It 
never has been true at any time, however much 
we may admit the fact that Christianity has often 
enough stood in danger of becoming lost in narrow 



68 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

cliques and cults. It is the danger of all great 
movements, and few can outlive it. But the spirit 
of Jesus continually breaks forth afresh, renewing 
in men the old wonder and joy. The instances we 
have had in biography of morose fanatics forcing 
their rigidity and gloom upon a helpless family are 
much better illustrations of the evil effects of the 
Nietzschean lust for domination than of the spirit 
and temper of Christianity. 



CHAPTER II 

THE FIRST STEP TO LIFE 

" Blessed are the poor in spirit ; for theirs is the Kingdom 
of Heaven." 

Who are the poor in spirit ? The poor-spirited, or 
even the spiritually poor ? 

" Poor-spirited " we may rule out at once, as in 
entire contradiction to that appeal to heroism which 
Jesus continually makes. Those who hold that 
the Kingdom of God is entirely an inward experience 
are mostly agreed that this beatitude refers to those 
who are conscious of spiritual need. We remember, 
however, that the form of the beatitude which we 
find in Luke's gospel reads : — 

" Blessed are ye poor ; for yours is the Kingdom 
of God." 

There has been some argument as to which really 
represents what Jesus said. It is suggested that 
Luke had a prejudice against the rich, shown in other 
places in his gospel as well as here, and that he, 
consciously or unconsciously, gave the words of Jesus 
a twist in the direction of his prejudice. 

On the other hand it is said that Matthew may 
have toned down what sounded too revolutionary 
to suit the polite tastes of his readers. The writer 
of Matthew's gospel was a Jew, and his gospel is said 
to have a Hebrew or Aramaic foundation. He 
ought to have been able to give the correct meaning 
of Jesus. Luke was a Greek, and may have given 
a literal translation. So perhaps the exact words 

6 9 



70 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

that Jesus used were, " Blessed are the poor," and 
the thing He meant was, "Blessed are the poor in 
spirit." Or He may, at different times, have used 
both versions. There is no reason to suppose that 
Jesus never went over the ground more than once. 
The point of this is, that we must find an interpreta- 
tion which covers both forms of the beatitude. 

We must beware of the attempt that some people 
make to " spiritualise " the teaching of Jesus. 
" Spiritualise " is their own word. I do not pretend 
to know what they mean. Certainly I have no 
great desire to be more " spiritual " than Jesus was. 

I remember calling on a preacher and finding him 
in concern because a sermon that he was expected 
to preach in two hours time was for some special 
occasion of which he had not been informed. Later 
on, I asked him how he managed. " Oh," he said, 
■" I took an ordinary sermon and spiritualised it." 
I have often wondered what sort of a sermon it was, 
both before and after the process. 

We get some light on what Jesus meant from a 
consideration of who the " poor " were. They 
were not the destitute. Palestine had not so far 
been favoured with such triumphs of industrial 
development that a " margin of unemployment," 
bounding a slough of destitution was one of its necessary 
conditions. Many were poor, in the sense that they 
had nothing for to-morrow, but there is no reason 
to think that any starved. Except in times of actual 
famine, people do not starve in the East. The poor 
generally were those who found just enough to support 
themselves and had no margin for luxuries and no 
time for idleness. Certain temple offerings were 
specially allowed to meet their case. The parents 
of Jesus made the temple offering of the " poor." 
So far as is discoverable there was no class which 
existed on " charities," save the lame, the diseased, 



THE FIRST STEP TO LIFE 71 

the blind, and such unfortunates. Jesus could not 
have had them in mind, for their state was one which He 
healed wherever possible. 

Not only so, but " the poor " had come to have 
practically a technical meaning, and it is doubtless 
that meaning which is covered by the phrase, " poor 
in spirit." Poverty of any degree may be the result 
of laziness, of inefficiency, of vice, though it is quite 
as often the parent of these things. But it is neither 
those who are poor because they are faulty, nor 
those who are faulty because they are poor, to whom 
Jesus here refers. 

In the Old Testament, the " poor " are the mass 
of common folk, the unprivileged, dispossessed by 
those of their day who wanted to realise what 
Nietzsche calls " the pathos of distance " (see Isa. 
v. 8), but maintaining in the midst of an arduous 
life a deep piety, and meeting the days as they come 
in a spirit of uncomplaining courage. We can find 
their modern equivalent at any time in the class 
of folk who endure hardships and face risks for small 
reward and less praise in the ordinary course of earning 
their bread. They meet life without gloves ; they 
know it, not from books, but from daily contact with 
its realities. They can " go without " when it becomes 
necessary, and whatever shelter they desire against 
the unforeseen, the terrible and the tragic, they must 
with their own hands erect. Having no position 
to keep up in the eyes of men generally, they act 
from themselves, and their actions are genuine. If 
they count as "somebody," then it is by native 
character and personality. What they know has been 
wrought into their lives by face to face dealing with 
the actual demands of life. 

William James tells us, in his Talks to Students, 
how he made this great discovery himself. He had 
escaped by train from an assembly at Chautauqua 



72 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

Lake, and was reflecting on the something missing 
from that " middle-class paradise," which had so 
affected him that he felt the need of a dip into the 
primordial or the savage to set the balance right. 
He says : — 

" And I soon recognised that it (the missing thing) 
was . . . the element of precipitousness, of 
strength and strenuousness, intensity and danger, 
. . . heroism, reduced to its bare chance, yet 
ever and anon snatching victory from the jaws of 
death. ... An irremediable flatness is coming 
over the world. Bourgeoisie and mediocrity . . 
are taking the place of the old heights and depths and 
romantic chiaroscuro." 

This is the very complaint of Nietzsche. One 
of his great sayings is, " Live dangerously," and 
the hearts of all who feel the flatness of life and the 
dulness of modern stay-at-home conditions cannot 
but respond. But we need not be trapped into the 
melodrama of Nietzsche's remedy. William James 
goes on : 

" With these thoughts in my mind, I was speeding 
with the train towards Buffalo, when, near that city, 
the sight of a workman doing something on the dizzy 
edge of a sky-scaling iron construction brought me 
to my senses very suddenly ... I had been 
steeping myself in pure ancestral blindness . . . 
Wishing for heroism and the spectacle of human 
nature on the rack, I had never noticed the great 
fields of heroism lying round about me. There, 
every day of the year somewhere, is human nature 
in extremis for you . . . Divinity lies all about 
us, and culture is too hidebound even to suspect 
the fact."* 

It is there, in the common lives of undistinguished 
people that reality can be found to all who care to 

* W. James : Talks on Psychology, 274/. 



THE FIRST STEP TO LIFE 73 

look, a daily struggle with untoward conditions, 
rising at the point of demand to the loftiest heroism. 
They do not talk about life, they live. 

Farthest removed from them in spirit are those 
who, surrounded by many artificial aids to life, have 
lost touch with life itself, and judge it by the unreal 
standards to which they have become habituated. 
They may be morally blameless, but their virtue 
has been the line of least resistance, or it is merely 
" good form " and does not spring from a free spirit. 
They are the people who never learn anything because 
it never occurs to them that they, being who they 
are, could be anything other than finally right. The 
spirit of unteachable self-complacency which is 
impervious to ideas is not peculiar to any one class, 
but the comfortably placed are certainly most liable 
to it. " You will hear everlastingly . . . this 
argument, that the rich man cannot be bribed. The 
fact is, of course, that the rich man is bribed ; he has 
been bribed already. That is why he is a rich man. 
The whole case for Christianity is that a man who is 
dependent upon the luxuries of life is a corrupt man, 
spiritually corrupt, politically corrupt, financially 
corrupt."* Riches do not shut any man out of the 
Kingdom of God, but they certainly make it hard 
to enter, because men are so ready to consider the 
power they owe to money, to birth, to office or other 
accidental circumstances, as virtues belonging to their 
personality, and as they are often in a position to slip 
through life without ever facing its crudities or taking 
their share of its burdens, they tend to be peculiarly 
self-satisfied and unteachable. They tend to the style 
of the Laodiceans, who said, " I am rich and increased 
with goods and have need of nothing, and knew not 
that they that were wretched and miserable and 
poor and blind and naked." 

* G. K. Chesterton : Orthodoxy, 217. 



74 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

Their tragedy is that scarcely anything costs them 
anything ; it only costs money. Take the artificial 
away from them, and they are like a deaf man who has 
lost his ear trumpet. 

" Does a rich man know what life is ? Does he 
keep himself in touch with the raw realities of life ? 
Can he understand, does he even see people and things 
as they are ? . . . A rich man cannot be a 
great artist. Even if he succeeds his art must be a 
hothouse fruit. The great Goethe struggled in vain; 
parts of his soul were atrophied, he lacked certain 
of the vital organs, which were killed by his wealth."* 

Blessed are the poor. But it is not poverty that 
itself is blessed. Blessed are the poor in spirit, 
because they have the disposition which is the first 
step toward the Kingdom of God. They are in 
touch with realities and are open to learn. 

The same idea is illustrated in the story of the 
rich young ruler. He was bidden, if he would be 
perfect — in life, for that was his desire, — to sell all he 
had and give to the poor, and — " follow Me ! " It 
was not a question of getting rid of his riches because 
it was wrong to be rich, or he would surely have been 
advised to throw his money away, and not to imperil 
the souls of other people by handing it on to them. 
He was to become poor, and follow Jesus, because 
he would then have to forsake the sheltered life 
of easy goodness that he had known. His life had 
been correct enough, but he himself had found it 
unsatisfactory. Let him come to life at first hand, 
and find it, not a seat in a cushioned carriage, but 
an adventure. 

Jesus had chosen to deal with life at first hand, 
to "live dangerously," but not melodramatically. 
He was no limelight hero demanding the stage to 
Himself, nor was He in need of the " pathos of 

* Romain Rolland : John Christopher. 



THE FIRST STEP TO LIFE 75 

distance " that He might stand out in better relief. 
He approved and chose the way of the poor, because 
He saw that this way of stark courage, with neither 
drums nor decorations, is the way of God, and so 
the way of life. 

The way of God ! But in what sense can we say 
that God is poor in spirit ? In this, that He is finally 
the Master of Reality. The God whom Jesus called 
Father is not some far off idle Potentate, but a working 
God, present in all the dust and struggle of the world 
order. As William James has said, God is not a 
gentleman, though the Prince of Darkness may be 
such. God, whatever we may conceive Him to be 
in Himself, is only revealed to us under the limitations 
of creative life, and in human personalities, of whom 
Jesus is chief and master. Our own freedom is a 
limitation to God, even though it be self imposed. 

If the story science tells us is at all to be trusted, 
God has made endless experiments, ever expressing 
Himself more and more fully in varying forms of life, 
until physical evolution ends in the birth of human 
personality. 

" Art Thou not all that is ? " 

" I am not all that is. I am Life fighting nothing- 
ness ... I am the Fire which burns in the night 
. . . I am the eternal Light ; I am not an eternal 
destiny soaring above the fight. I am free will which 
struggles eternally. Struggle and burn with me."* 

AH life is an adventure, and God is the Great Adven- 
turer. " My Father worketh hitherto and I work," 
is the word of Jesus. And still He works through 
those who possess this spirit which Jesus exhibits 
and commends. There is no way to Personality 
save by the door of Reality. 



* John Christopher, Book iv., 159 /. 



CHAPTER III 

DIVINE DISCONTENT 
"Blessed are they that mourn : for they shall be comforted." 

Most things can be overdone, and even virtue has 
its special temptations. It is not always easy to say 
just where economy becomes meanness, where 
prudence changes to cowardice, or courage to fool- 
hardiness, where kindness runs to seed in weakness. 
And the way to prevent such calamity is not to aim 
at being " moderate " in all things, moderately 
economical, moderately brave, moderately kind, but 
to balance economy with generosity, courage with 
wisdom, kindness with firmness. That is the 
Christian way. 

The characteristic described by Jesus in His first 
beatitude has this special danger, that those who deal 
with life at first hand and are ready to learn from 
every experience, who take the rough with the smooth, 
are apt to lapse into an easy-going fatalism. It may 
be of the cheerful sort which sees the humour of 
it all : — " Ah, well, we've got to take the world as we 
find it. The sun will shine to-morrow, likely 
enough." It may be the pathetically helpless, which 
sings, " Meekly wait and murmur not." It may be 
the cynical — " Um ! This is Life, this is ! " In any 
case it acquiesces, and without joy, or any sense of an 
end which makes the experience worth while. It 
is much too ready to " accept the inevitable." 

The message of the second beatitude is that we are 
not to be so easily satisfied, either with ourselves or 

76 



DIVINE DISCONTENT 77 

with things in general. If self-complacency is the 
fault the first beatitude by implication hits at, then 
complacency with the evil order of things is the fault 
aimed at here. Our willingness to learn from any 
experience and to face realities is not to become a 
readiness to accept any experience as inevitable and 
unalterable. We can learn from evil things, but we 
are not to accept evil as of the final nature of things. 

Our man of the beatitudes has seen a vision of life 
in the Kingdom of God. The bandage has been taken 
from his eyes. He will set about realising the Divine 
life in this world, ready to learn from every experience 
that offers. He finds evil things on every hand, some 
of which he suffers from and meets with what courage 
he can compass, others which he sees falling hardly on 
those about him. In his towns he finds the most 
horrible ugliness and squalour. He is given to under- 
stand, should he make any comment on these things, 
that they are prevalent in all towns, apparently are 
a necessary part of town or city life. " But/' he is 
assured for his comfort, " where there's dirt, there's 
money." Which is true enough. In his streets he 
finds destitution and misery. He is reminded that 
even Jesus said that the poor would always be with 
us. He meets, as he goes about, the maimed and 
disfigured and diseased bodies of his fellows. Round 
the corner is the asylum and the hospital for " incur- 
ables." The heavy squat building on the outskirts 
of the town is the gaol. 

His morning paper gives him to understand that a 
strike is in progress, despite the war clouds that hang 
so heavily over the land. The war columns tell him 
with something like triumph that our new big guns 
have worked incredible and unprintable havoc upon 
thousands of the enemy. There are stories of sickening 
atrocities. In an obscure corner there is recorded 
the fact that the condemned man walked firmly to 



78 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

the gallows, and that a severe sentence was passed 
on the parent who had cruelly tortured a little child. 
The editor perhaps has a leader on the remarkable 
progress of civilisation. 

At his work our man makes acquaintance with the 
coarseness, stupidity, insolence, perversity, triviality 
and general awkwardness of some of those in company 
with whom he earns his living. 

In the evening he picks up a book of history or 
travel and learns something of man's inhumanity to 
man. In the middle of his reading a friend drops in 
with news about that bit of jobbery in the Town 
Council . . . 

" It's disgusting ! " he says. 

They talk on for a while, and our man pictures the 
town as it might be, if things were done a little differ- 
ently. He gets quite eloquent as he warms up, and 
before he knows what he is at, has reorganised the 
world, "a little nearer to our heart's desire." The 
friend laughs good naturedly. . . 

" Ah, my boy, you're one of these quixotic idealists, 
that's your trouble. All you succeed in doing is to 
make yourself miserable. / say, don't notice these 
things. Be above them, if you can, but anyhow, take 
no notice. You can't alter them. If there's a God, 
they're His will — disease and so forth, any way, — I 
suppose wickedness won't be. It's no use worrying. 
You cannot alter human nature." 

Is our man to accept that as the last word on the 
matter ? 

And perhaps, when he ought to be turning in, his 
thoughts come round to this : I have been blaming 
all these people, but what about myself. They hang 
on to evil because they think there is some security 
for themselves in it, because they are afraid to let 
themselves go in frank and open dealing. Have I 
dared to trust the impulse to fellowship and truth 



DIVINE DISCONTENT 79 

and right at all costs, which is all that is needed to alter 
the face of the earth ? 

He is not the happiest man in the world when he 
turns off the gas on his way to bed. 

Yet Jesus says, " Blessed are they that mourn." 
He would not mourn if he had not seen something 
better. There is something hopeful about it after all. 
The good artist is dissatisfied with every picture he 
ever painted. He has never got all his vision ex- 
pressed yet. You may consider him foolish, if he 
has done his best, but you will admit that he is more 
likely to paint the really great picture than the man 
who made a hit by painting a poodle in his early days, 
and has gone on painting poodles ever since. 

The good engineer, the engineer on the way of life 
so far as engineering is concerned, is the man who is 
dissatisfied with every engine he has ever seen. He 
is the man who will invent a better. 

" Verily, neither do I like those who call everything 
good, and this world the best of all. Those do I call 
the all-satisfied. 

" All-satisfiedness, which knoweth how to taste 
everything, that is not the best taste."* 

There is a divine discontent, as well as the one 
which is grumpy, sour and impotent, literally a divine 
discontent. 

For what right have we to be discontented ? Where 
do we get these ideas of a perfect order, of a free and 
full and satisfying life ? Where do they come from, 
these " thoughts that burn like irons when we think ? " 
We know that it is the deepest in us that speaks at 
these times. Nay more, we know that if men 
universally gave rein to that instinct, the world would 
be a better place. 

It is the way of hope, after all. The man who 
mourns at the presence of evil may fail to remove it, 

* Nietzsche : Thus spake Zarathustra. 



80 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

in spite of his best endeavours, but the man who 
accepts it as inevitable will never try. The Creative 
Will cannot use him. He represents inertia, the dead 
weight which is hardest to lift. He stands in the 
way of every good thing, bland, stupid, immovable, 
perhaps the most exasperating person in the world. 

The most alive personality is the most sensitive, 
but it is not always comforting to be sensitive. The 
ear that is readiest to approve the perfect harmony 
suffers most from the discord. 

Blessed are they that mourn, to whom, as to Jesus, 
evil is a grief and a degradation, because so far removed 
from God's final purpose for man. A pig in a ditch 
does not move us, but a man in the ditch does, for he 
is not in his proper place. 

Jesus believed that the Father was ever working 
to enlarge life, to set it free from limitations ; that 
were men ready to join hands in the enterprise, the 
things that thwart and cripple life might be overcome. 
Evil is not to be acquiesced in, nor even to be argued 
about, but to be overcome. Of the man blind from 
birth the disciples asked, " Who did sin, this man or 
his parents ? " The answer is, " Neither did this 
man sin, nor his parents. But that the works of God 
should be made manifest in him, we must work the 
works of Him that sent me," that is, cure him.* 

To be sensitive is not always comfortable, but the 
sensitive to evil are also sensitive to good. The 
mourners shall be comforted, for they will ever be the 
first to catch the hint of good, the promise of better 
things. It is they through whom God can work, 
who will not accept the evils of the world as inevitable, 
who will not shrink from bearing the burden of them, 
who will acquiesce in nothing that is alien to what 
they have seen of God. Because they seek to evade 
nothing, their spirits may often be filled with anguish, 
* John ix. 2-4. Reading suggested by Dr. Campbell Morgan. 



DIVINE DISCONTENT 81 

but never will they be more truly sons of the Father 
than at that point. It is then that they are " met 
from the eyes and brow of Him who was indeed 
acquainted with grief, by a look of solemn recognition, 
such as may pass between friends who have endured 
between them some strange and secret sorrow, and 
are through it united in a bond that cannot be 
broken."* 

Out of their efforts and pains the Kingdom of God 
will come. 



* Dora Green well. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE WAY THAT SUCCEEDS 
" Blessed are the meek ; for they shall inherit the earth." 

It sounds incredible enough. We think of Mark Twain's 
ironical remark as to this being the place in the Bible 
where the English are referred to. We have lived, 
however, to see it dealt with much more seriously, as 
witness : — 

" This prophecy has almost literally come true : 
for the weak (sic) have not done at all badly in this 
regard. They have certainly inherited many parts of 
England, if we may judge from the death-like stillness 
that surrounds everything on a Sunday . . . the 
sanctimonious faces . . . the mournful gait . . . 
Everything that elevates life, that stimulates life, is 
carefully kept out of sight. The shadow of death 
hangs over all."* 

This will serve as showing what the Christian values 
have come to mean for some people. It may be true 
that Christian people have only themselves to thank 
that it is so, but it is certainly not the fault of the 
teaching of Jesus. If we have been right in our 
interpretation of what was the final test of value to 
Him, then meekness is some quality which belongs to 
God, and its survival value is in its strength, its power 
to add to life. 

Perhaps we may have misunderstood it. Perhaps 
we have dragged down a good word to the level of our 

* J. M. Kennedy : Nietzsche, p. 52. 
82 



THE WAY THAT SUCCEEDS 83 

timidity and made a virtue of our cowardice. What 
is the current Christian notion of the meek man ? 
What is the usual fate of the type that answers to our 
notion ? 

Lest I should be guilty of parody, I have looked up 
some correspondence in a religious paper on this 
very point, 

The question was, " If there is a meek man in your 
office, what will happen to him ? " There were many 
answers, which may be roughly summarised as 
follows : — 

1. The meek man will be put upon, and will be 
despised for so allowing his good nature to be taken 
advantage of. In the end he will probably be dismissed 
for inefficiency. 

2. The meek man will suffer, but will finally win. 

3. The meek man will suffer, but must simply bear 
it all with resignation. 

The one thing about which there seems to be general 
agreement is the idea of what "meekness" means. 
There was no definition given, but all assume that 
meekness is a passive virtue. No self-assertion and 
barely self-respect. And that seems to be the generally 
accepted idea of meekness. The meek man will suffer 
all things in the spirit of the martyr, perhaps with 
what is known as " the air of a martyr," than which 
nothing much more provocative exists. He will not 
protest, he will only look mournful and injured. 
When he confides his troubles to another meek brother, 
he will receive, maybe, the assurance that he will have 
hi reward in heaven. 

" But the meek are to inherit the earth." 

" Ah, true ! Others may have the deeds and own 
the land. But none can rob you of the landscape." 

There may be occasions when that statement is true, 
but to offer it seriously as an explanation of the 
promise of Jesus will not do. It makes one feel a 



84 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

keen sympathy for the man who, on being exhorted 
to look for a crown above, asked for half a crown now, 
to be going on with. 

I feel that I can understand a little of Nietzsche's 
scorn. Perhaps he was nourished in his youth on 
spiritual food of that sort. 

I have seen a man at a country fair put a sovereign 
into a threepenny purse and then offer it to the crowd 
for a shilling. I have seen a country youth hand up 
his shilling and receive his purse. And I remember 
his face when he opened it and looked for the sovereign. 
What I have seen of Jesus makes me quite sure that 
He made no illusory offers of that sort. When He said 
that the meek shall inherit the earth, it was because 
He believed that they will. Nor do I find in Jesus 
either an example or a teacher of merely passive 
virtues. Nor do I believe that the virtues of God are 
passive virtues. 

What did Jesus mean by this beatitude ? 

Jesus quotes almost word for word from a verse 
in the thirty-seventh Psalm. In that Psalm we find 
that meekness is set in contrast not so much to the 
insolence and aggressiveness of the powerful, as to 
the spirit of fretfulness and angry impatience which 
is perhaps natural to the man who is confronted with 
evil, in the shape of a successful and flourishing evil 
doer. Meekness is opposed, that is, to the spirit of 
resentment which does not really lessen the sum of 
evil, but adds to it. 

" Fret not thyself, it tendeth only to evil doing." 

We have moreover in the Old Testament a story 
that would be quite familiar to Jesus, the story of 
the man who was by the Jews regarded as pre- 
eminently the type of meekness. We shall have to 
find room for Moses in our idea of meekness. Not 
many would venture to call him weak who welded 
the Jews into a nation. The story of his leadership 



THE WAY THAT SUCCEEDS 85 

is the story of persistent patience, with odd lapses which 
emphasise our idea, for we are given to understand 
that they were the points at which he failed. He 
refused to be discouraged, he refused to let his 
purpose be overcome, though his followers were never 
so stupid and obstinate. He shepherded them, gave 
them laws, instructed their ignorance. He took hold 
of a group of spiritless slaves and made them a free 
people. Yet, " the man Moses was very meek, above 
all the men that were upon earth." 

Meekness, in the case of Moses, was the patience 
which would not stop short of its purpose. 

We can now see what Jesus means. Meekness 
balances the " mourning " of the second beatitude as 
that balances the first. The temptation of the man 
who is sensitive to evil is to grow violent about it, 
to rage and storm, to clamour for repressive laws. 
M Righteous indignation," of course. ... In 
extreme cases he becomes the Nihilist, and renouncing 
society and all its ways, sets himself to destruction. 

The good is not to be won that way. Evil is not 
overcome nor the cause of life furthered nor greatness 
shown by our becoming bitter or violent, but by 
persistent and assiduous well-doing. When you have 
lost your temper you have betrayed your cause. 

You remember the wet sammer evening when you 
undertook some little and overdue repair in the house. 
It seemed quite a small matter and not worth bringing 
in a man for, but it turned out to be one of those 
perverse little j obs that need three hands and the power 
to see on both sides of a thing at once. You kept on 
patiently and at each failure started again. Then 
suddenly, your patience snapped and you hurled the 
offending thing across the floor. 

You will remember that you had to buy a new one 
and felt rather small over it. It was a failure in 
meekness. 



86 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

In John Maseneld's Dauber, when the crowd of 
shipmates gather round to mock at what they judge 
to be his crude painting their victim replies : — 

You cannot understand that. Let it be. 

You cannot understand, nor know, nor share. 

This is a matter touching only me ; 

My sketch may be a daub, for all I care. 

You may be right. But even if you were, 

Your mocking should not stop this work of mine ; 

Rot though it be, its prompting is divine. 

Had Dauber been meek in some merely passive 
sense he would have given up as a bad job the painting 
which offended his mates. But he held on. The 
same spirit made a man of him and won their respect 
when he had to take his turn aloft in the gale. 

That is meekness : active patience in the face of 
untoward conditions. The spirit that keeps its temper 
— and keeps going on. It is not the virtue of the weak, 
nor does it belong to cowards, for it never gives in 
and never knows when it is beaten. It is a man's 
virtue, nay a God's. If there is one characteristic of 
the Creative Will that no one can possibly deny, it 
is infinite patience. It will not be suppressed. It is 
a virtue of Life itself. 

But, it may be said, anyone will agree that to lose 
patience with inanimate things is foolish. It is a 
different matter when the evil is violent and personal. 
The inanimate thing does not strike you back or 
plot deliberately against your well-being. There is 
no malice in it. Suppose it is another man who is 
the difficulty, a man malicious and evil in spirit, who 
deliberately does you an evil. Shall patience deny 
justice ? Are there no human rights it is a duty to 
defend, no point at which resentment is a duty ? 
This question will be more fully answered later, but 
meanwhile let it be said that nothing could be further 
from the truth than to suppose that in these cases the 



THE WAY THAT SUCCEEDS 87 

proper attitude of the Christian is one of pas- 
sivity, or that the Christian has no power to stop 
evil, or that he must be content with evil conditions 
which can be removed. We have already seen that. 
We shall find, however, in all cases, that the rule of 
patience holds good. 

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. 
Jesus adds to the Old Testament promise the idea of 
the Kingdom of God, which is to come on earth, a 
spiritual order in which all evil shall be overcome. 
In a sense in which Mr. Kennedy and those who agree 
with him do not seem to realise, the meek are coming 
into their inheritance. The scientist patiently in- 
vestigating, refusing to give up his belief in the ultimate 
intelligibility of things ; the seeker after new powers, 
patiently continuing his experiments in the face of 
repeated failures ; the inventor, making trial after 
trial, scrapping disappointment after disappointment, 
yet starting again ; these are all in their several 
spheres examples of meekness, and they are inheriting 
the earth. They are enlarging the possibilities of 
human life and pushing back its limitations. And 
though they sometimes refuse to serve God as sons, 
yet as servants they do His will and hasten the day 
of His kingdom. Whether servants or sons, their 
meekness springs from a great faith, from the con- 
viction that they who ask shall have, they who seek 
shall find, and to them that knock the door shall be 
opened. 

It is precisely so in the sphere of conduct and of 
human relationships, from the smallest to the largest. 
The world is made for the fullest life for all men, for 
conscious sonship, for Personality. Whatever hinders 
that is evil, and being evil, can be overcome. But 
only by the way of patience. We may fail and fail 
again. Men may refuse to respond. The arguments 
so convincing to us leave them unmoved. Evil may 



88 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

mock at us as we view mournfully the ruins of our 
endeavour. We may be tempted to lash out in 
violence and bitterness, to cry out hysterically for 
repressions and floggings and vengeance on wrong- 
doers. And perhaps our own self esteem is hurt. 
We cannot easily bear to fail. Let us fling the whole 
thing up. Why waste time over such stupid and 
ungrateful folk ! 

It will be better to remember two things. One, 
that violence and bitterness never succeeded yet — 
not finally. 

The other, that wise saying of Mazzini, who had 
abundant opportunites for judging : " Discourage- 
ment is disenchanted egoism.'' 

We will build again, and build better. 



CHAPTER V 

THE PASSION FOR RIGHTNESS 

" Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after Righteousness , 
for they shall be filled" 

" Then," one can imagine a critical hearer saying to 
himself, " after all this large air and fine talk, this 
' stuffing so much into the heads of paltry people,' 
this wringing of the hands over evil, the practical 
conclusion is that you must be patient and take what 
you can get ! You go out with a brass band and all 
the flags flying, and before the triumphant strain has 
died away you have dropped down into an ordinary 
compromise maker, who veils his shabby little efforts 
for advantage with idealist clap-trap. We know the 
breed. They promise men great things at political 
elections and such like. ' The millenium is on 
the way. Only elect me, and the day will have 
arrived/ When, later on, we enquire if some solid 
gain is not about due, they smile wisely and knowingly, 
as pitying the ignorance of those who cannot be 
expected to see what great things they are accomplish- 
ing, and tell us to be patient. And when at last, 
perhaps, come the mountain throes of parturition, 
behold — a mouse ! Be patient. That means, keep 
on compromising ! " 

Let us admit that this, if somewhat, though no 
more exaggerated than what one often reads in similar 
strain, is the danger of the meek, and that, yielded to, 
it has been the ruin of many a good man. Meekness 
becomes weakness. Patience becomes that slackness 
which passes for tolerance. 



90 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

It happens that a traditional saying of Jesus gives 
us His opinion of that kind of tolerance, as well as 
showing us by implication the vitality of the virtue 
He demanded. 

" Beholding one working on the Sabbath, he saith 
unto him: Man, if thou knowest what thou doest, 
blessed art thou : but if thou knowest not, accursed 
art thou, and a transgressor of the law." 

Jesus was no timid rule keeper, but equally He was 
no compromiser, and we may be sure that if a value 
He recommends to us lays us open to the danger, He 
has not forgotten to add the corrective. In meekness, 
Jesus has given us a tool to work with. Now He hands 
us the whetstone. 

". Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after 
righteousness." 

Hunger and thirst, as experiences, we probably only 
know the beginnings of. A sailor friend has told me 
of thirst-maddened seamen throwing themselves over- 
board, and of those who reached land plunging into a 
pool of fresh water and wallowing in it. Thirst means 
to him what it can never mean to me. I have been 
hungry and beyond the reach of food, but once I saw 
a decently dressed man snatch out of the mud of a 
city street a broken biscuit, which a child had flung 
down, and rush up a side street to devour it. I must 
conclude that I have never known hunger. 

Jesus chooses the strongest words He can find. 
Hunger and thirst are not demands that can be put 
away and forgotten. They are primary and elemental 
things, quite equal to keeping themselves before our 
notice. We may be patient, but if patience becomes 
complaisance, we are not really hungry. 

The object of this intense desire is Righteousness. 

This is one of the great words of the Bible, and that 
it stands for something big and positive is clear on 
the face of it That, no doubt, is why those who attack 



THE PASSION FOR RIGHTNESS 91 

the beatitudes stop short when they reach this one. 
No unprejudiced person could describe it as " negative 
morality," or as " slave morality." So far as it 
represents morality at all, we might call it, with Mr. 
Parton Milum, " brother morality,"* but it really 
lifts the matter into another sphere altogether. 

" The Greek word popularly rendered 'righteous- 
ness, ' but having from its root a much wider significance, 
includes the purely ethical idea of upright behaviour 
in the more extensive conception of balance, wholeness, 
the perfect equilibrium of a nature no longer out of 
relation with any element in the universe, "t 

There is an inward demand that we all make on 
life, a demand for harmony, proportion, balance, 
fitness, completeness. The sense of beauty springs 
out of that demand, the sense of truth, the sense of 
righteousness. 

I found an artist friend in difficulties over a picture. 
He knew what he wanted and possessed the requisite 
technical skill, but his work did not satisfy him and 
he could not get on with it. What he said was that 
it was not " right." I saw it again a week later. My 
first words were, 

" You have done something to this picture. It 
looks different." 

" Yes," he said. " I got it right." 

It was some question of balance. He had neither 
added nor taken away anything, strictly speaking, 
but a tree in the middle distance had been moved an 
inch or so and its tone deepened. The change had 
turned the representation of a landscape into a picture 
which satisfied. In my friend's own slang, it was 
something more like " it." But " it " was not the 
landscape, but something in himself, and, as I 
recognised, in me also. 

* Revolutionary Christianity. 

f Woods : The Gospel of Rightness. 



92 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

Truth, goodness and beauty are the famous trinity 
of which philosophers have discussed the meaning for 
centuries. I do not propose to add to the sea of words, 
but merely to point out that they have all one thing 
in common. We may not be able to define the terms 
so as to satisfy anyone but ourselves, and perhaps not 
even that, but when we recognise that a thing is true 
or good or beautiful, we mean that it satisfies that 
inner demand of ours for balance, fitness, harmony — 
for " Tightness." The thing is right, in its own sphere ; 
it satisfies our taste, our conscience, our moral sense, 
we may say. Ultimately it is our Personality that is 
satisfied. That tastes differ, and that people are not 
all agreed as to what is right and wrong does not affect 
the question, for there are personalities in all stages 
of development. What satisfies the sense of Tightness 
of the most perfect personality will be finally right, 
and will be the most expressive of and most helpful 
to life. 

And if we push back beyond all the scattered and 
imperfect personalities of men to that ground of all 
our personalities, the tree on which as leaves we grow, 
the complete Personality, which is God, we must think 
of that quality in its fulness as being the expression 
of His life also. 

We have the right so to push back, since it seems 
clear that this threefold ideal is not of our making. 
We but respond to something which is already there. 
It may come to us as a mere hint, awaking our desire, 
but as we follow it in any or all of its directions it 
widens out before us and becomes infinite. There is 
nothing to stop us ; we have only to go on to find God. 

Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after 
righteousness, — that is, Tightness in the sphere of 
action. 

Righteousness cannot be reached by rules, any more 
than truth or beauty can be created by them. They 



THE PASSION FOR RIGHTNESS 93 

are all expressions of Personality. Yet, to continue 
our illustration, there are principles of composition, 
to violate which is to defeat the artist's own end. 
Furthermore, righteousness, like truth and beauty, 
is an abstraction. The words stand for qualities which 
we find in persons, actions, ideas, things. How to 
transfer what we see into some concrete form which 
it will illuminate is a question of method. The Sermon 
on the Mount is a manual of principles and illustrations 
of method. But the first demand, without which 
principles and methods can only produce a mechanical 
imitation of the real thing, is the sense of Tightness, 
and the passion to express it. " Except your righteous- 
ness exceed the righteousness of the Scribes and 
Pharisees, ye shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.'" 

Jesus believed that the sense of Tightness was 
already present in the hearts of men, no more an 
alien or a stranger than the sense of truth or the sense 
of beauty. If we cannot define, we recognise them, 
and as in the sphere of aesthetics the hunger of a man 
for beauty and his efforts to express what he has seen 
of it develop his personality and enrich his life ; and 
as his success in such expression is the measure of 
the richness of his personality, so in the sphere of 
action. Jesus urged men to trust that inner con- 
viction, to follow it in the face of anything that would 
impose on them from without. For it is the very 
voice of God. 

The dreams of the Hebrew prophets were the 
creation of their sense of Tightness. All they realise 
of beauty and truth and righteousness glows in their 
words. Jesus, greater than them all, aware of a 
relationship to God and to His fellows which was not 
found by report but in experience, was able to gather 
up and interpret all their hints, and prove the reality 
of His insight in the expression of His own personality. 
Here He tells us how we may follow His example. 



94 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

In its form this beatitude differs from the rest. 
Why did not Jesus say, " Blessed are the righteous ? " 
Partly, no doubt because perfect righteousness can 
only be expressed by God, to whom we are to aspire. 
But there is another reason, which it is important we 
should notice, for it concerns the nature of right- 
eousness. 

It will be clear by this time, that righteousness can 
no more be a private thing than beauty can. There 
can be no special Tightness which is the preserve of a 
few, and from which others must be warned off. If I 
can see more deeply than others into the nature of 
things and confront men with a daring achievement 
or a new interpretation, or even with what has been 
called " a new size of man," it is good indeed, and I 
must hold to my vision at all costs. But if the new 
thing is not finally true and possible and vital for all 
men, it does not count, any more than the appearance 
of a three-legged man would count. If the Superman 
cannot take us all with him, he is no superman, but 
merely a freak. There can be no " master morality " 
and " slave morality " maintained as separate things 
finally suitable to different orders of men, for one 
or the other would be a defiance of the nature of things 
and so doomed to perish. The " transvaluation of 
all values," in the direction of a special morality for 
great men is much what the transvaluation of the 
principles of composition for select artists would be. 
The results would be startling enough, as freak pictures 
sometimes are. They are not as a rule painted by 
masters, but by those who mistake crudity and violence 
for strength and eccentricity for genius. 

There is another side to this, for Jesus has not 
finished His picture, and we shall have to look at the 
possible fate of the pioneer. No further consideration, 
however, can invalidate the fact that I can only fully 
satisfy my demand for brightness," which is part of 



THE PASSION FOR RIGHTNESS 95 

my demand for Personality, as I seek it in every 
possible human relationship. 

Righteousness is a social value : it is part of the 
Kingdom of God. If I am ever to " come out and be 
separate," it is not that I may be alone above men 
with a special kind of virtue to be exercised for my 
own advantage. That has no more value — even for 
me — than the invention of a language for my own 
private use. It is only that I may be unencumbered 
by compromise and complaisance with evil. I am 
to keep the edge of my sword sharp. 

The Pharisees were separatists of the exclusive 
sort. " This people who knoweth not the law is 
accursed.' ' They despised the herd. But it is a fact 
and not a fancy that their way was not the way of life. 
They had meant well in the beginning : — the purifica- 
tion of their nation. They were the select few who 
would improve the type Jew, as Nietzsche's master 
moralists are to improve the type Man. They ended 
as such separatist attempts always do, in a cul-de-sac. 
The aristocrat is officialised. He becomes a dog in 
the manger, not only failing in life himself, but blocking 
the way for others. Except your righteousness exceed 
the righteousness of the separatists ye shall not enter 
into the Kingdom of Heaven. 

When we seek righteousness together, says Jesus, 
we shall get it : but this promise, like all others, looks 
forward for its perfect fulfilment, though it is realisable 
now. The final righteousness to which we look, with 
which we shall be filled, is that of the life of the perfect 
Kingdom, when God and man are finally at one, and 
righteousness, along with all other forms of rightness, 
will be the spontaneous and joyful expression of 
complete Personality. 



CHAPTER VI 

CONSIDERATENESS 
" Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy." 

A well-known Bible Dictionary informs us that 
Christianity chiefly emphasises and values the*' milder 
virtues." I have found that one has to be careful 
about the meaning of words in these matters, or it 
leads to misunderstanding. What is a mild virtue ? 
When a friend offers me a cigar and assures me benignly 
that it is quite mild, he wishes me to understand that 
its flavour is not strong enough to affect me at all 
disagreeably. He may be only anxious to propitiate 
my delicate taste in cigars, but his assurance of mild- 
ness sounds more like a good-natured desire to spare 
my weak head. Are the Christian virtues mild in 
that sense, and is the Christian to be, like the dog 
which barks furiously when you are at the gate and 
licks your hand as you ring the bell at the door, hungry 
for righteousness, and then merciful? One of the 
mediaeval saints, a woman, too, kissed the face of a 
decapitated criminal whom in mercy she had attended 
to his death. Could that be styled the working of a 
mild virtue ? 

Let us draw one distinction to clear the ground. 
Pity and mercy are often confused, but they are not 
quite the same. Pity is an emotion called out by a 
state of weakness, suffering or helplessness in another. 
It carries with it the idea that the one who pities is in 
a more favoured position than the object of his pity. 
Nietzsche tells us that pity is " the virtue of the weak 

9 6 



CONSIDERATENESS 97 

and botched," meaning, I take it, the virtue they 
admire. As a matter of fact they more often deeply 
resent pity. It would be more correct to call pity 
the virtue of the favoured, who tend to regard the 
wretchedness of others as something to sharpen their 
feeling of superiority on. 

The Christian attitude towards weakness and suffer- 
ing is described not as pity, but as compassion. That 
also is an emotion, but the compassionate, as the word 
suggests, " suffer with" the sufferer. Even the 
favoured do not pity their friends, they sympathise 
with them. Sympathy is very nearly compassion. 
The pity of the patronising is a luxury, but compassion 
is a pain. Jesus was moved with compassion, and 
always moved to help. If it be said that compassion, 
suffering with the sufferer, is a virtue which uses up 
the strength, one can only reply that that is what 
strength is for, to be used. Compassion is the fellow 
feeling of the strong and the desire to express that 
feeling in helpfulness. Its opposite is callousness, 
which means lack of imagination, and is a sign of 
poverty of Personality. 

Mercy springs from the will, and is the fruit of a 
decision arrived at on consideration of some defect 
in another's character and achievement which might 
seem to deserve censure or even punishment. For 
reasons which satisfy, it makes allowances and stays 
or limits censure or punishment. 

As Jesus uses the word, the meaning seems to be 
that of considerateness, kindness, which presses no 
advantage, and is ready to stop short of pressing a 
claim to the full. 

Mercy is often opposed to justice, and if the justice 
in view is the necessarily cold and mechanical type 
which obtains in a court of law, we can understand the 
opposition. But that is not the kind of justice that 
Jesus dealt in. Nietzsche puts it well : " Justice is 



98 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

love — with seeing eyes." Justice is, in the end, the 
same as righteousness, which we have seen must in 
its perfection belong only to God. Equally so must 
perfect mercy be looked for there, for Jesus is still 
drawing the perfect man with God as the model. 
" Be ye merciful as your Father in heaven is merciful." 

Now we cannot think that two such qualities as 
righteousnesss and mercy can exist in the same 
personality in their perfection if they are really opposed 
to one another. If they are exercised alternately, 
then one is in abeyance, and if they annul one another, 
then neither has any meaning for us. We read of 
" justice tempered with mercy." As a phrase applic- 
able to law courts, we understand what is meant, but 
even then it means something less than justice. 

Perhaps mercy is not applicable to God at all, but 
is merely the virtue of the coward who runs up an 
account and snivels when the bill comes in ! We are 
told that nature is sternly just, and knows no mercy, 
that to break the laws of nature entails evil results 
which are certain and cannot be escaped. Let us take 
the kind of illustration usually chosen by those who 
argue so. The drunkard has broken nature's laws. 
He reaps from what he sows, and the unhealthy face, 
jumpy nerves and poisoned blood are the reward. 
He has reaped the reward of evil, men say. But there 
is surely some confusion here. What is the evil of 
drunkenness ? Is it not just that it produces evil 
results ? If it did not, there would be nothing evil 
about it. The act of drinking is in itself innocent 
enough. The results are the evil. The drunkard has 
simply called upon nature to ruin his body. He has 
not broken the laws of nature : he has experienced 
their working. 

Well, then, let us say that he broke the laws of 
health, and so met the reward of disease. We must 
not be misled by the sub-conscious moral implication 



CONSIDERATENESS 99 

we read into " laws of health." The plain truth is 
that the man chose to take things which are uniformly 
found to be detrimental to the health of the body. 
He found that he was no exception. He was foolish 
to think so, and his folly has returned on his head. 
There is no escape. Nature lets nobody off. In that 
sense we might say that nature knows no mercy, but 
that is only another way of saying that certain effects 
follow certain causes. And that is as merciful as it 
is just, neither more nor less. Certainly we could not 
live in a world where it was otherwise. Nature is not 
vindictive. The man who drinks too much gets plain 
hints that he is injuring his body. The moment he 
takes the hint and ceases the course which led to evils, 
the work of healing and restoration sets in. That is 
justice as much as it is mercy, neither more nor less. 

Both the pain that follows the one course and the 
healing that follows the other suggest that some power- 
ful force in nature is making for life, will hurt us if 
we attempt to thwart it, and will be behind us if we 
obey it. 

And there is a real sense in which nature makes 
allowances. Man has become what he is from being 
an extremely ignorant and limited creature. He has 
had everything to find out, and that has made a man 
of him. But at every stage he has found a world 
he could use and take part in. His imperfect know- 
ledge has never crushed him out of existence. 

The whole truth, however, is that in the natural 
order all talk of justice and mercy is a little absurd. 
They are personal terms and can only be understood 
in relation to Personality. We may speak of them 
in relation to God and man and not properly anywhere 
else. The whole story of man's religious experience 
is the story of God's righteousness and mercy, working 
not in opposition or alternation, but for the same end. 
At all stages of his religious experience we find man 



ioo THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

reaching after God, and sharing in the purpose of 
God, the bringing of many sons to a more complete 
knowledge of Himself and themselves. Men blunder 
and fail, and when they follow something less than 
the best they know, or turn back again to the ways 
of the beast, the inevitable result follows. This is no 
theory, it is the plain story of history. But the 
moment they repent, that is, see their error and strive 
to amend it, healing and renewal follow. For God is 
not vindictive. Justice to Him does not mean that 
someone must be made to smart. It means the 
triumph of the divine way, which is the way of life 
for all. Any man is sufficiently punished when he 
finds he is wrong and really turns to the right. If 
punishment shows a man that he is wrong, it is mercy 
as much as righteousness. If he finds that he is wrong 
and turns to the right, then to stay punishment and 
grant forgiveness — that is the putting away of the sense 
of wrong — and a renewal of life is justice as well as 
mercy. And so it is written, "He is faithful and just 
to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all 
unrighteousness. " 

That then was how Jesus thought of God, and such 
was His own practice. He never condoned evil, but 
He never flung back on his sins the man who repented 
of evil. In His story of the prodigal, the hunger in 
the far country was justice, but also mercy, for it 
brought him to himself. His reception at home was 
mercy, but it was also justice, for it meant that 
righteousness had triumphed. 

But Jesus went farther than that in His thought 
of God. His was the daring belief that God suffered 
with the sinner and for the sinner, that the righteous- 
ness and mercy of the Father were but two sides of a 
deep and awful love which has set itself to win men at 
all costs, which will not abate by one jot the tremendous 
purpose in which all our greatest good is contained, 



CONSIDERATENESS 101 

but will strive and struggle and suffer in us and with 
us and for us till the great end be obtained. It was 
His vision of the Father that made at once the agony 
and triumph of His cross, where no one can say whether 
the hunger for righteousness or the passion of mercy 
is more supreme. 

Having seen so much, the way of the man of the 
Beatitudes will be plain. He is to hunger and thirst 
after righteousness. He may, in his inadequate con- 
ception of righteousness, be tempted to be harsh in 
his judgment of others, inconsiderate in his demands, 
severe in his condemnation of those who not only do 
not come up to his standard, but who do not yet 
perceive it. He will be apt to refuse to make any 
allowances for those less favourably situated than 
himself. He will be tempted so to do and be, if he 
does not remember that what he stands for is so much 
bigger than his own personal idea that in the light of 
perfect righteousness his own achievements will not 
be noticeably greater than those of men he is inclined 
to judge hardly. We cannot afford to be harsh judges 
of one another. That is the simple truth. We all 
need mercy as well as justice. 

The man who follows Jesus will learn to put himself 
in the place of others, and by a great understanding 
to feel with them, to share in their hopes and joys 
as well as to bear something of their burdens. He 
will find himself made strangely conscious of the 
presence of God in so doing. It is not a great person- 
ality that flees from the sorrows of others or disdains 
their limitations, nor is it on the way to become such. 

This is but another instance in which Jesus appeals 
to a deep instinct in ordinary and unsophisticated men. 
There are virtues which may be counted arguable, 
but kindness speaks for itself. The search after God 
has led men into strange fields. Men have scaled the 
heights and dared the depths, and have brought back 



102 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

but vague reports, couched in language hard to under- 
stand. It is an open question whether by all their 
arguments they have cleared more doubts than they 
have raised. 

Myself when young did eagerly frequent 
Doctor and Saint, and heard great argument 

About it and about ; but evermore 
Came out by the same Door wherein I went. 

Jesus, so sure of God, so fulfilling our highest ideas 
of what God must be and of what true Personality 
means, tells us to look into our own hearts. Be kind, 
He says, and you will find the kindness of God. 

It is not the most righteous man who is hardest on 
the sinners, not he in whom life and Personality are 
a glowing flame who is most contemptuous of the small 
spark which burns in lesser spirits, not even the robust 
who are most scornful of the " physiologically botched," 
but those whose own hold on these things is not too 
secure. Mercy is the fit attribute of the great. For 
one thing, they can best afford it. For another, they 
know themselves well enough to know that they need 
it. And they shall obtain mercy. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE SENSE OF DIRECTION 
" Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." 

To the mystic or the quietist to whom the Kingdom 
of God is an inward experience only, this is the crown 
of the Beatitudes, and as we read it we can easily 
summon to the mind such a picture as the history 
of mysticism provides us with — some ascetic rapt in 
a trance in which he passes beyond time and sense, 
while with radiant face he beholds the ineffable vision. 
For this, we conjecture, a stainless purity is the first 
condition, the putting away of the things of the body 
and of the active world about us : then, solitude and 
silence, the last thought of the mind hushed, life 
stilled until it becomes bare existence only. Is this 
the way to which we are now pointed ? 

Mysticism itself is not peculiar to Christianity, but 
there have been Christian mystics enough, and I should 
be sorry to deny either the reality or the value of their 
experiences. No religious life can be maintained 
which does not send its roots deep down into the things 
which are unseen. Because they do this the mystics 
have kept religion alive and fresh into the most arid 
days of the church's history. There is a mysticism, 
however, which is negative, which involves withdrawal 
from life, for it is founded on the idea that the natural 
order is not only imperfect, as we might expect a 
growing thing to be, but radically evil, or an illusion 
from which we must escape if reality is to be touched : 
that this reality, when found, is so near to Nothingness 

103 



204 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

that it has just about the same value — that is, if this 
world order and the experience of life and our own 
personality have any value at all. 

It is not to be denied that the spirit's greatest 
adventure is the quest for God, but it would seem that 
the order in which we find ourselves is the place which 
should lend itself to that quest. That is the standpoint 
of Christianity, whose central doctrine is that of God 
manifest in the flesh. Manifest, mark you,not hidden. 
And whatever mystical interpretations this beatitude 
is susceptible of, the question for us is to discover what 
Jesus meant when He used it. That seems fairly 
plain. There is nothing in all the Sermon on the Mount 
to suggest the desertion of the earth. Its main idea 
is as we have seen, that the present order is to be trans- 
formed and to become the vehicle by which a spiritual 
order may find expression. It is to become the tools 
and the raw material of the spirit, and the whole range 
of human life is to be the deliberate expression of such 
developed personalities as Jesus pictures for us. The 
" world" which comes in for hard knocks and is looked 
upon as the enemy, is not the natural order, but the 
human order as it organises itself without reference 
to spirit. 

If this conquest of Personality over the natural order 
is to be won, there must be among those who desire 
such an end a real sense of direction, the more so that 
Jesus has not given us a code of rules. It is not enough 
to aspire, to mean well, or to be sincere. Sincerity 
may belong to the bad as well as to the good. If the 
thing a man seeks is evil, his sincerity makes him a 
greater danger. All the parties in any given war think 
that they are right. The people who instigated the 
burning of witches and heretics were sincere. They 
were not deliberate devils, though their deeds suggest 
it. Yet we all agree that they were wrong. They 
set out to achieve righteousness, but they forgot mercy, 



THE SENSE OF DIRECTION 105 

and so did not reach righteousness either. A closer 
study of the mind and purpose of the God they pro- 
fessed to worship would have taught them better ways. 

We are to make the Kingdom of God possible. To 
do that, we must not only mean well — we must do well. 
We must see rightly what the way of life is, what the 
will of God is — and we must see far enough ahead to 
save ourselves the need for turning back and undoing 
at great cost what it has already cost much to do. 
If we are to live as sons of the Father, we must so 
know the Father that we can move and act with 
confidence. 

It is not an easy matter. We are, for example, to 
hunger and thirst after righteousness and yet to be 
merciful — and not to be half and half. How to judge 
in a particular case ? At what point would mercy 
slip away from righteousness and become an easy 
complaisance with wrong, and so no longer mercy ? 
It is so much easier to maintain a standard of moderate 
righteousness and moderate mercy, and to cease the 
attempt to be either when the problem becomes 
troublesome. The great European war is the climax 
and reward of moderate righteousness. It is the fruit 
of years of diplomatic intrigue and of international 
relationships in which the last thing that has been 
thought of — if ever thought of at all by the people 
most concerned — was that there might be a way which 
was God's way. 

It is only an extreme and dramatic instance of what 
obtains generally. People of goodwill — the majority 
of the race — are continually being asked to engage 
in this or that crusade, sometimes represented to us 
as a crusade for righteousness, at others as a crusade 
of mercy. Our own country is full of movements, 
societies, unions and the like, all pro- or anti- some- 
thing, and the " pros " and the " antis " are sincere 
enough in thinking that their side is right. How am 



106 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

I to settle which side to send my subscription to, or 
whether to send any at all. Not many can afford to 
adopt the policy of the duke in Mr. Chesterton's 
Magic, and send impartially to both sides, even if that 
were the way out of the difficulty. 

We all claim to want what is " right," but our 
"rights " seem to be at variance. If we all agreed 
on what is right, in a railway strike, in politics, in 
the suffrage question, in the social purity or the drink 
question, no doubt the solution would soon appear 
to be both necessary and practicable. But we do 
not. What do we mean by "right " in these connec- 
tions ? Is there any standard by which we could 
know ? 

We saw that Jesus took God for His standard. 
The will of God, which is righteous and merciful, is the 
fullest Personality for all men, described as sonship, 
a conscious partaking of divine life. The test then 
of what is " right " in any case is not my own will, 
still less my prejudices, or what seems to be my 
immediate advantage, but the will of God. 

Now Jesus assures us that those who with singleness 
of purpose desire the will of God alone shall see God. 
The blessing here is for the " single eye," by which 
the whole body becomes full of light. Those who 
really want to know God's way shall know it. 

Is it not the truth that in most of our difficulties 
and decisions we do not want to know God and do 
His will at any cost ? What we do want is to discover 
what can be said for our own case. We want to justify 
somehow our own way of life, to persuade ourselves 
of the reasonableness of our own private claims. 

Now it is utterly vain to make professions of a 
search after God while we are in such a position. It is 
the most searching and even terrible accusation that 
is hidden in this beatitude, for its implication is that 
there is only one thing that prevents men from finding 



THE SENSE OF DIRECTION 107 

God, and that is, that they do not want to find Him. 
They will not face the demand that finding Him will 
make upon their lives. They will search after some 
idea of God which will fit in with their schemes, but 
from the burning and cleansing love of God they run 
away. Yet in that love is all our hope for the attain- 
ment of Personality. 

Jesus spoke with the authority of one who knew. 
We cannot conceive of anyone more likely to know. 
And His assurance is that if we will live out our lives 
with the single and undivided desire to know and do 
God's will, we are blessed, for we shall see God. The 
way to the Kingdom will be made plain to us. 

John reports Jesus as saying, " My judgment is 
righteous, because I seek not my own will, but the will 
of Him that sent Me." 

We are in confusion and involve ourselves in disaster 
because we do not act so. It is true all round, whether 
in our individual lives or in our corporate life. The 
reason why the many great discoveries of man leave 
him still in bondage, despite all their promise, is that 
the question of their use has not been brought to this 
test, but has been decided on other grounds. 

That to live with such singleness of purpose is not 
the mark of a poor Personality, and that to have clear 
vision of the end to be followed makes for strength 
and not weakness need hardly be argued. 

This, then, is the vision of God which Jesus promises. 
Not merely the finding of God as the end of an argu- 
ment or the terminus of an experiment, nor even in 
some trance of ecstacy, but in intimate touch with our 
own Personality. And the way is the way Jesus had 
tried and proved. 

It is in this knowledge of God that we serve Him, 
not as servants, " for the servant knoweth not what 
His master doeth," but as sons. 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE PEACEMAKERS 

" Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of 
God." 

What kind of a figure do we conjure up when we hear 
the word — peacemaker ? 

Perhaps a busybody going round interfering in the 
quarrels of others, and incidentally providing food 
for more quarrels. Perhaps a limp and genial person 
whose greatest life-effort has been the endeavour to 
be on both sides of the fence at once. Perhaps a 
benevolent old gentleman separating two quarrelsome 
boys by giving them a penny each and sending them 
off in opposite directions. He probably did not notice 
the parting gesture of the young scamps which meant, 
" You wait till I catch you to-morrow ! " 

Who are the peacemakers ? Those who intervene 
between opposing parties and end the outward activities 
of a quarrel — say, a Conciliation Board ? For example 
should some person have the power and the will to 
stop the war which is occupying the world's attention 
as I write, would he not be acclaimed as a Peacemaker 
and as worthy of the blessing of this beatitude ? 
Yet whether he deserved the title as Jesus meant it 
would altogether depend on the kind of peace he 
produced. Both sides in the war claim to want peace, 
indeed to be waging war to secure it. Are they peace- 
makers ? 

If men are to deserve the name " sons of God " for 
their peace-making, then it must be God's kind of peace 

108 



THE PEACEMAKERS 109 

that is won, a peace that makes for the Kingdom of 
God, and all that we have seen that great phrase to 
mean. It cannot be a dead peace, but a live one. 

' ' Peace is a spiritual state, and can only be produced 
in any man or nation by a free, inward response to 
the stimulus of fellowship."* 

There are many ways in which peace, in the sense 
of cessation from conflict, can be secured. It may 
come by exhaustion, both sides of a quarrel having 
come to the end of their resources. They retire, 
calling it a draw, and hasten to make themselves 
stronger for the next attempt. It may come by brute 
mastery. One may hold such an advantage over the 
other that the vanquished is " bled white," to use the 
elegant military phrase. Germany thought she had 
done this for France in 1870. It may come by 
compromise. The arbitrator comes along and 
persuades Black that grey is practically black, and that 
anyhow it is more easily turned into black than into 
white. He assures White that grey is only white with 
the bloom off. It is quite the same inside. They go 
off, each with grey in his pocket, but when they get 
home they take out their greys to look at them again 
and feel as you did when you examined at home those 
cheap things you bought in a dark shop. From 
that moment the quarrel begins again, though it may 
be long before it comes to a head. Compromise 
alone never settled a quarrel yet : it only postponed 
the settlement. 

Then peace may come by indifference or contempt. 
One may be too dense to see a wrong or too contemp- 
tuous to heed it. Or it may be mere stagnation and 
death. 

I have seen pictures labelled Peace : a ship in 
harbour with the sails furled, a battlefield with the 
dead piled up beside the broken guns, a still pool in 

* The Removing of Mountains. 



no THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

which trees and stars were mirrored. The Bible speaks 
of " peace like a river," quiet, but alive, and moving 
irresistibly to its destination. And when we come to 
God as peacemaker, we read that He made peace 
through Jesus, slaying the enmity by the blood of His 
cross, and so reconciling the world to Himself. 

It seems then, God's peace is an active and reconcil- 
ing thing, that it overcomes enemies by slaying enmity, 
that it means active co-operation in the ways of life. 

To stop a quarrel may be a good thing, but to heal 
one is much better. May we not go on to say that to 
prevent one is best ? 

For too long peace-making hasbeenregardedasmen 
regard the work of a doctor, as a matter for healing at 
the best, often stopping some trouble we have asked 
for by our own folly. Doctors, it is to be noted, are 
beginning to object to this. They talk about stamping 
out disease. 

Peacemaking after the pattern of Jesus is a funda- 
mental work. It starts at the beginning of things 
and recognises that peace does not come by itself: 
it has to be made, prepared for. " If you want peace, 
prepare for war," we have heard only too long. We 
have had our answer. It would seem that Jesus made 
no wild shot when He said, " Men do not gather grapes 
of thorns. " Peace must be made by seeking righteous- 
ness, not assuming it. It must be built on a foundation 
of fair-dealing and fellowship, and the recognition 
of every individual's right and duty to achieve 
Personality. There is no other way than this. 

We must not think we shall have won peace when 
we have ended some war or all wars, for the act of war 
by steel or cordite is but one fierce example of the 
spirit of strife. An industrial dispute may be as cruel 
as a battle, a lock-out as heart-rending as a siege, a 
sectarian quarrel may breed as bad blood as a fever 
of jingoism. 



THE PEACEMAKERS III 

The man who pursues or consents to a course of 
which a quarrel must be the end is a quarrel maker 
though he be dead and buried before the smoulder 
breaks into flame. Those who desire peace, must begin 
with what makes for righteousness and fellowship, 
and must endeavour to make their goodwill obvious 
and clear. There can be no peace if either or both 
of two nations or classes or persons has chosen 
" advantage-to-me " for its end, or desires to dominate 
or play the bully, even though it be for the other 
person's own good. It takes two to make a quarrel 
and also two to make peace, but the spirit of co-oper- 
ation and fairness and open dealing breeds confidence, 
just as the spirit of selfishness and crookedness breeds 
suspicion. 

Nothing could be farther from the truth than the 
idea that war and strife are the fit expression of great 
personalities or that they produce them. That war 
brings into relief great qualities of heroism and self- 
sacrifice there is no doubt, but it does not create them, 
and there are better and more urgent fields of service 
for their display. " Is there," asks Romain Rolland, 
" no better employment for the devotion of one people 
than the devastation of another ? Can we not sacrifice 
ourselves without sacrificing our neighbours as well ?" 
If life has become so tame and sordid that men welcome 
the field of battle as a dip into reality, is there not in 
that tameness and sordidness a call to change our 
manner of life and create a new world. Would not 
that, if taken up in the same spirit of self-sacrifice, 
provide a field for heroisms as great as any the field 
of war may show.? 

Let us not imagine that peace-making is a tame affair, 
a work for cowards and slaves. The greatest peace- 
makers are those who can unite men by appealing to 
them with the power of a great ideal. That is no task 
for little men. It is much easier to quarrel with another 



U2 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

and even to win a contest than it is to win a man, " to 
gain thy brother," as Jesus puts it. The real reason 
why peace-making has been attended to so little is 
not that it is too easy, but that it is too hard. It 
takes too big a man. 

Peace-making demands the utmost readiness to learn, 
a fearless facing of truth, willingness to co-operate, 
patience, a passion for Tightness, considerateness, 
clear perception of the way of life. In other words, 
you must draw in all the other features of the man 
of the beatitudes before you crown him with the 
supreme gift and write the inscription, " son of God." 
The supreme gift is the power, not to divide men, for 
that is easy, but to reconcile men in the pursuit of 
the highest good, in which they will personally find 
each his own good. 

It is not only hard, it is costly. If it does not carry 
with it the more dramatic heroisms of war, it calls 
for heroisms of a nobler sort. Of what sort the example 
of Jesus, the great peace-maker, shows us. But the 
world, even the Christian world, has not as a whole 
shown much inclination to take those risks yet. It 
has never seriously set about peace-making, though it 
has talked much of its desirability. 

Perhaps the reason is that before people will sacrifice 
for an ideal they must be led to see its worth. A 
negative ideal wins no man's enthusiasm and 
commands no man's consecration. But Christians at 
least have no excuse for considering peace under such 
a form. War has had those to praise it with passion, 
and they have been heard. We may consider that 
the praise of war is nonsense, but as it has been said, 
" We may not have talked nonsense passionately 
but we have not told the truth passionately either ; 
and so, when we have told it, no one has listened 
to us."* 

* The Cure for War. A. Clutton Brock. 



THE PEACEMAKERS 



ii3 



We cannot put passion into our peace-makine until 
we conceive of the peace-maker, not as a preacher of 
passivity, but as a great builder of the things that 
make for life and Personality, the things that strife 
destroys We must create conditions which will 
charge the common life of men with new meanings 
open the door to greater possibilities of beauty and 
J°y. and unite them in the willing pursuit of ends which 
both in themselves and in their pursuit are nobler 
and more satisfying than the aggrandisement of wide 
possessions or the intoxication of conquest 

We cannot put passion into our truth-telling until 
we see the truth clearly enough and love it dearly 
enough to be willing to commit ourselves and our 

,S£ e K * *i t: / Teither P e ace nor passion, nothing 
indeed but the deserved contempt of men, can com! 
to him who sees the truth but evades the toil 

They shall be called sons of God," shall be 
recognised as having the divine life within themselves 
burely the topstone of vital Personality, to be reckoned 
as God-like. But first they must have broken out of 
the narrow circle of suspicions, resentments and 
hostilities which has shut man in from the beginning 
and which to be shut in has been to so many men 
strangely enough, food for pride. Let a man once 
venture outside and he wonders at his own lone 
complaisance, For he has escaped. He knows it 
He has come out into a large place, and the new air 
he breathes is the air of heaven. 



CHAPTER IX 

PAYING THE PRICE 

"Blessed are they that have been persecuted for righteousness* 
sake ; for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. Blessed are ye when 
men shall reproach you, and persecute you, and say all manner 
of evil against you falsely, for My sake. Rejoice and be exceeding 
glad ; for great is your reward in Heaven ; for so persecuted they 
the prophets before you." 

At the close of our study of Righteousness a question 
was waiting to be answered. What about the pioneers 
in every department of life ? They have always had 
to meet the charge that they were freakish and im- 
possible. Every advance in knowledge has been 
furiously contested by self-appointed custodians of 
the "truth " who declared that the new was the 
wildest folly and ignorance. The whole story of 
progress is the history of lonely souls who went far 
ahead of their fellows, and paid the price in blood 
and tears. 

That is the truth, and though the being persecuted 
is no sure guarantee that one is a pioneer of that sort, 
pioneers must be prepared to pay the price. Jesus 
therefore adds to His picture of the new man this note 
as to what fate he may look for as the reward of his 
efforts. If he is to face reality he will find hardships 
and even perils, but when he goes on to deny the vested 
interests of evil, he will find that those who think they 
profit by evil are waiting for him, and not with a 
welcome. If he is counselled to be patient it is 
because there is something to be endured. If he is 
to have a passion for Tightness, he will often be 
misunderstood. He must be prepared for loneliness, for 



PAYING THE PRICE 115 

difficulty, for blame, for opposition, and even for malice 
and injury. Persecution is the active opposition of 
those who do not want what you want. In that sense, 
the " good " may persecute the "bad." Indeed that 
is generally, though not always, the idea that 
persecutors have about themselves. But no man ever 
learned to persecute another from any connection he 
had with Jesus. 

As we are told elsewhere, to start on such an adventure 
as this that Jesus calls us to without counting the cost, 
is only to become a laughing stock. Better leave 
things alone than put our hands to the plough and 
then look back. It is just this insistence on the need 
for the utmost courage and devotion that makes some 
of the sayings of Jesus sound as if there were a real 
aristocracy among His followers, and has given rise 
to the idea of the " elect." Election is real enough, 
but it is not arbitrary. It is the attraction of one 
personality for another*. Nietzsche is not far wrong 
when he says : " The seductive power of the Christian 
ideal works most strongly upon natures that love 
danger, adventure and contrasts ; that love every- 
thing that entails a risk." A dangerous admission on 
his part, for it disproves so much else that he said. 
The " aristocracy " of Jesus is that in which greatness 
is measured by service. But it is open to all. The 
invitation stands for any who will take it, and the 
risks involved. 

But why should Jesus have given this beatitude 
the double form peculiar to itself? The first half 
refers to the past, to those who "have been 
persecuted ; " the second to persecution which may 
be looked for. Jesus does not generally base His 
approvals on past instances. Is it to emphasise the 
blessedness of being persecuted, to promote the 
temper which seeks martyrdom? That temper 

* Bigg— Confessions of St. Augustine, 11. 



n6 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

became prevalent at one period in the early church, 
and had to be checked. George Jacob Holyoake, in 
his autobiography, tells us that his own prison 
experiences led him to believe that it is not at all 
blessed, but highly uncomfortable to be persecuted. 
The jibe, that Jesus added "for righteousness sake," 
does not apply in his case, though it is well to bear 
that condition in mind. 

The real answer is that Jesus did not approve of 
the temper that seeks martyrdom. What moved Him 
most in His own case was that His refusal to flee and 
betray His mission involved His enemies in a great 
crime. He only accepted the end because there was 
no other way open for Him to fulfil His mission. 
He had tried all other ways. The counsel He gave 
to His disciples in one case — not as a universal rule — 
was : " If they persecute you in one city, flee to 
the next." 

There is no happiness in being persecuted. The 
immediate experience is one that all who have in the 
least degree known it will desire to avoid. It often 
seems humiliating, and it puts the Christian out of 
that fellowship with others which he seeks. The 
blessing is not attached to the experience, but to the 
result, based on the fact that persecution has never 
yet been able finally to smother or destroy truth. 
The Kingdom of God still comes. It was " for the 
joy that was set before Him " that Jesus endured 
the cross, not for any joy in the experience. 

Jesus therefore begins by pointing us to those who 
have been persecuted, to those who "for righteous- 
ness' sake " suffered, and maybe died. Did they ever 
rue it ? Can we wish that they had been more 
pliable ? Never ! The one thing we do feel is that 
what they won was worth the price they paid. Is 
that so ? Then, blessed are you ? when men shall 
persecute you. Rejoice and be glad, for you are in 



PAYING THE PRICE 117 

the succession. The same fate is yours, and the same 
reward. Blessed are you. 

" Not a grave of the murder 'd for freedom but grows seed for 

freedom, in its turn to bear seed, 
Which the winds carry afar and re-sow, and the rains and the 

snows nourish." 

The Kingdom of God is worth all we can pay for it, 
or it is not worth much. The "reward in heaven" 
is no mere making up afterwards for what has been 
suffered and endured now. The reward is that we 
have shared in the cost, that we have paid a part of 
the price, and can enter into an inheritance that has 
not wholly been the fruit of the labours and pains 
of others. We shall not be wholly ashamed to stand 
before the Son of Man. 



CHAPTER X 

THE RESULT 

" Salt of the earth . . . light of the world ... a 
city set on a hill ... a house built upon the rock." 

Jesus has now drawn His picture, setting out with 
broad touches the type of personality which is needed 
to make possible on earth that spiritual order which 
He calls the Kingdom of God. A man ready to learn 
and eager to deal with realities, but no worshipper 
of things as they are ; rilled with profound dissatis- 
faction with all that limits life, but never letting his 
dissatisfaction break out in mere petulance or anger; 
patient in the face of evil, but persistently pursuing 
the highest ends ; insatiable in his demands for Tight- 
ness, but considerate in his judgments, kind in his 
dealings with those who see things differently or 
fail to reach his standard ; possessing the clear vision 
of the single mind which is not set upon its own 
advantage ; ever ready for fellowship and co-operation 
with others, but prepared to pay the price of standing 
alone — this is a rough outline. 

What are we to say of him ? Is he a possibility, 
or a fantastic jumble of ill-assorted qualities ? Will 
he make for fullest life or the denial of life ? Will he 
be a weak personality or a strong one ? Will the world 
be a richer or a poorer place if he is multiplied ? 

The best answer to all these questions is Jesus 
Himself, Who is the perfect exhibition of all these 
qualities in one personality. Not that Jesus thought 

118 



THE RESULT 119 

out a conception of virtue and then proceeded to live 
by His own rules. His life was the spontaneous 
expression of the relationship to God of which He was 
conscious. If His picture of the ideal man differs from 
ours, it was because His conception of God was different. 
What we have described as the Will to Personality 
was to Him the divine actually welling up through 
human limitations and seeking expression in life. 
He tells us what He found and shows us by life and 
word how the complete realisation of what the deepest 
in us demands is possible. The Kingdom of God will 
come, not as a swift and shattering blow upon an 
unready world, but as men see what the divine ideal for 
them really is and trust themselves to it. The 
hindrance is, as He found, that men find it hard to 
get away from the state of suspicion and fear that 
clings to them, dare not break down the walls which 
they have built about themselves, hug their exclusive- 
ness and think to add to their wealth of being by the 
possession of external things and their power to 
dominate others. We know, when we think things 
out, that such is the fact. We know that life on these 
lines does not satisfy us. Yet we dare not venture 
on the other. 

Jesus has given us a lead : He has shown us a 
completely satisfying life, in which the divine and the 
human are at one. And He says, Follow Me, and 
become in your turn not only receivers of life but 
givers, salt of the earth, light of the world. 

Will the world be richer or poorer if more of us follow 
that lead ? Will our own personalities be richer or 
poorer ? That is the question we must ask ourselves. 

For myself I can only say that if there is a more vital 
Personality or a fuller life than that of Jesus, or one 
that accomplished more, I do not know where to look 
for it. I find in history the story of men who won 
and held or held without having won, the power of 



120 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

life and death over others. I see men pathetically 
trusting to their strength and justice, so eager are 
they to follow a leader, but I am not very favourably 
impressed with the result. The powers these great 
ones wield always prove to be too much for 
them. They make in the end for death and not life. 
It is notorious that the great ones in power must be 
surrounded by mediocrities. They cannot do with 
other great and free personalities too near to them. 
The little stool which is said to be needed when the 
group photograph is being taken is typical of much. 

And Jesus succeeded. That the divine way must 
be the only finally successful way is clear. Where is 
he who, living from any principle which Jesus opposes, 
could say, " I have finished the work thou gavest me 
to do." True, Jesus died, and the end was tragic. 
Napoleon, to take a typical strong man, also died, 
Which was the worthier end ? On his own well-known 
confession, Napoleon failed, and Jesus succeeded. 
We may freely admit the greatness of Napoleon, while 
we recognise that this greatness was turned in the 
wrong direction, and that one of him is as many as 
the world can profitably do with. He is a mighty 
example of how not to do it, and this, not by some 
sentimental test, but by the test of satisfaction for 
the Will to Personality. He never found that 
satisfaction. "He was corrupted," Nietzsche admits, 
' ' by the means he had to stoop to, and had lost noblesse 
of character." 

The " great ones" have been on the wrong track. 
Almost universally they have been on the wrong 
track. And the track to which Nietzsche now points 
us is not a new track. It needed no discovery, for 
it is the best worn track in the world. All manner of 
fine things and some sordid ones are to be found at 
the end of it, but not life, not fulness of Personality. 
History is a long testimony to its failure. 



THE RESULT 121 

Ye are the salt of the earth — but where has the 
Christian Church been all this time ? It has had nearly 
two thousand years in which to sweeten life, to produce 
great personalities, to lighten the world. Is it not as 
much a failure as anything else ? Is not its failure 
the proof that the way of Jesus, however splendid, 
will not work in a practical and busy world ? 

One cannot wonder at the question, and we must 
honestly answer it. The church is not by any means 
an entire failure. It has produced some of the greatest 
personalities, and a better average of Personality than 
any other institution. It has kept alive the spirit of 
Jesus to this extent at least, that He and His way are 
still a living issue. This is not the place to argue the 
pros and cons of the church's doings. We can get 
more quickly to our point by asking a question. 

Has the church failed, whether its failure be in little 
or in much, because it has adopted the way of Jesus ? 
Is it the method or its imperfect and partial application 
that has been wrong ? 

There can be no doubt about the answer. As 
Christians we must frankly confess that we have not 
lived by the method of Jesus, except in part. We 
have not dared to trust ourselves to it. Christ has 
been divine in the creeds. We have been very fierce 
indeed with those who did not make Him divine enough 
— in our creeds. But in practice we have thought 
that we knew better than Jesus. Our bishops have 
told us that the Sermon on the Mount is not practicable, 
and we have found a new beatitude for them : — 

Blessed are the moderate, for they do not put too 
great a strain on our virtue. 

" If the salt have lost its savour, wherewith shall 
it be salted ? It is thenceforth good for nothing. . . ." 

I do not altogether wonder at Nietzsche. He 
picked up a handful of salt that he found about him, 
and tasted it. . . . Then he went in disgust to 



122 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

his own laboratory and set about creating a new 
compound, taking care, as he thought, to get plenty 
of flavour into it. And the result ? There is a tonic 
taste in it, a touch of bitterness as well, and a subtle 
something that seems to go to the head and make 
men act and talk wildly — particularly talk. It might 
be compared, perhaps, to the Tono Bungay of Mr. 
H. G. Wells's novel, and the spirit in which Nietzsche 
sometimes wrote to that of Bill in Bernard Shaw's 
Major Barbara: — " I'm no gin drinker, but when I 
want to give my girl a good 'idin', I like to have a bit 
o' the devil in me. See ? " 

Certainly the new compound is not salt. 

Yet the way of Jesus and the words of Jesus still 
stand. Salt is good, salt and sunshine. In these days, 
when European civilisation, built as it is on the ideals 
of force, dominance and self advantage, has gone 
down like a castle of sand, and shown itself helpless 
to stem the rush of the worst and lowest passions of 
men, would it not be worth while, perhaps, at any rate 
to try the method of Jesus. 

Those of us, at least, who name the name of Christ 
must ask ourselves : Are we merely flavoured with 
salt, or are we salt itself? Is our virtue merely that 
of custom or habit, or does it spring from our own con- 
sciousness as sons of the Father ? Do we merely reflect 
a light which shines upon us, or are we light, burning 
and shining ? Jesus demands original virtue of us. 
His teaching is not given to bind or cripple us, nor even 
to put us in leading strings, but to direct us to the 
means of light in ourselves, the salt hidden in our own 
hearts. 

Yet the aim of Jesus is not merely that those who 
follow Him should be noticeable. They will be so, 
but not because they set out with that end in view. 
They may often do the conventional things, but their 
observance of convention may be more exciting than 



THE RESULT 123 

another's denial of it. There is such a thing as slavery 
to unconventionalism, a dreadful state when a man 
dare not do the obvious thing. The unconventional 
may be as much of a routine as the conventional, and 
more of a slavery. 

The true difference is, that to the Christian, life is 
to be an art, and not either a routine or a mere job to 
be done anyhow. He may do things conventional or 
unconventional, but he will do them with distinction, 
just so far as he has the mind and spirit of Christ. It 
was the way He did things as well as what He did 
that marked Jesus off from others. He put Himself 
into all that He did. It was true self-expression. 

It is chiefly by this difference that the true son of 
the Father will be known. He will do human things 
in a God-like way. Jesus never suggested, as some 
theologians have done, that " merely human" virtues 
are no virtues at all in the eyes of God. He exalted 
the simple virtues : what we are to do to be like Him 
is so completely to recognise them as the voice of God 
that we can do them divinely instead of fearfully and 
grudgingly as is our way. 

The tree will be known by its fruits, partly by their 
nature, partly by their quality. That method of life 
is the true way and the divine way which both produces 
and is the expression of the most God-like Personalities. 
Not the most showy or the most eccentric, or the most 
arrogant, or the loudest in their profession of adherence 
to Jesus, but the most God-like. 

It is not our business to judge one another, but every 
man is judged — well for him if he judges himself. He 
is judged daily by all his acts of choice, by his power 
or failure to act graciously and freely in all that he 
does. But especially is he judged by the emergencies 
which he has sooner or later to meet. Finally, the 
greatest Personality is the one that can bear the 
greatest strain without collapsing. And that is just 



124 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

the test in which Jesus promises success to those who 
follow Him. It was the test He Himself faced and 
from which He emerged victoriously. The new man 
of Jesus is like a house built upon the rock of reality. 
He will stand the strain of the greatest test. The test 
is not death, though it may sometimes involve the 
facing of that adventure. As Whitman tells us, the 
real emergency is life, not death. 

Such judgments may come upon us at any time, and 
come to all men at some time. And it is then that we 
may know, if we are honest, what the quality of our 
life is worth. So long as things go smoothly with us, 
and life runs a normal course, it is not hard to live a 
decent and reputable life. All our surroundings help 
us, for they are in the main the surroundings which 
are created by and maintain the standards we judge 
by. We can live easily then, as Nietzsche might say, 
as members of our herd. But let a crisis come, whether 
it be some social or personal calamity which sweeps 
away all our artificial aids, something that threatens 
or makes a sudden demand upon our integrity, or 
merely the unexpected problem, and we are found 
out. If we have been weak or pretentious or half- 
hearted, or if we have been merely conventionally 
"good" or even conventionally unconventional, our 
nakedness is revealed and should there be, as we watch 
the collapse of the house we have lived in, any power 
left to us to see or speak the truth, we may call to 
mind, if we know it, the little speech of Mrs. Knox 
in Fanny's First Play : 

" We don't really know what's right and wrong. 
We're all right as long as things go on the way they 
always did, until something out of the way happens 
. . . We find out then that with all our respect- 
ability and piety, we've no real religion and noway of 
telling right from wrong. We've nothing but our 
habits ; and when they're upset where are we ? 



THE RESULT 125 

Just like Peter in the storm trying to walk on the sea 
and finding he couldn't/' 

It is a searching comment on the collapse of the 
unconventionally good but the conventional rebel 
would fare no better. If life is to stand these tests 
it must be based on reality and not on sentimentalism 
and pretence, of whatever sort. You do not reach 
reality by merely breaking commandments, any more 
than by keeping them, and the young people who take 
the desperate advice of Mr. Shaw — in his preface to 
the play — and do something that gets them into 
trouble, may find that knocking out a policeman's 
teeth or spending a fortnight in prison is not of necessity 
more satisfying than the most blameless Sunday School 
tea party. 

No one ever proposed a more searching test of 
Personality than Jesus. What strain will it stand ? 
With that in mind, Jesus bade us live as sons of the 
Father. He showed us the way, and Himself stood 
the test. 

'Tis the life of quiet breath, 

'Tis the simple life and true, 
Storm nor earthquake shattereth, 

Nor shall aught the house undo 
Where they dwell.* 



* Euripides : Bacchcs (Gilbert Murray trans.). 



PART III 
THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

" Spend no more time in stating the qualifications of a man of 
virtue, but endeavour to get them." — Marcus Aurelius. 



CHAPTER I 

ANOTHER LOOK AT JESUS HIMSELF 

" Christ on the Cross is still the most sublime symbol— even 
now." — Nietzsche. 

As I observed in an earlier chapter, there are many 
who stop at this point, assuming either that these 
counsels of Jesus on conduct are all that He has to 
give us, or at least all that matters to those who are 
seeking the true way of life. To such, a great deal 
of what has already been said about the personality 
of Jesus might seem superfluous. I hope to make 
it quite clear that it is not, that He Himself is really 
the significant part of His message, not only because 
His personality guarantees its truth, but because He 
transcends it. 

It is clear that we can only know the nature and 
catch some hint of the purpose of the Creative Will by 
observing it in action and noticing its expression. It 
is in human personality that we must look for the 
highest and clearest expression. 

If we find by the answer of our own consciousness 
that Jesus has told us the truth about ourselves, we 
cannot but conclude that He has told us the truth about 
God also. That conclusion has already been hinted 
at — perhaps assumed, but it is the only possible 
conclusion. It is vain to talk about anthropomor- 
phism. The most abstract philosophy ever conceived 
of man is anthropomorphism. The fact that it is 
probably highly unintelligible does not in the least 
save it from that. Jesus is the revelation of God 

129 9 



130 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

Himself in human terms, and no other terms are 
possible to us. It is folly to look for them. 

God comes near to us in Jesus. That is the plain 
fact. Our theological or philosophical interpretation 
of that fact is a small matter compared to its recog- 
nition. His way of life represents the divine way of 
life, as well as the way for us ; nay, because it is the 
divine way of life, it is the way for us, whose 
Personality is our sonship to the Divine Father. 

We must turn once more to Jesus, for there is much 
that we have so far overlooked. It is not for us to 
say that it is unessential. We are to learn, not 
dogmatise. 

We find, on re-reading the story, that at a fairly 
definite point in His ministry the tone of His teaching 
changes. The sixteenth chapter of Matthew's gospel 
gives us a clear feeling of the change. Was it purely 
the result of the gathering opposition, or did it spring 
from new perception of what being the son of the 
Father involved ? It is a new feature in the story, 
and we must look at its meaning for our study. 

Jesus came to the conclusion that the fulfilment 
of His mission could have but one end, a violent death 
at the hands of His enemies. He found Himself in 
opposition, not only to evils which limited and injured 
those about Him, but to evil of an aggressive sort 
which threatened His own life. He found men with 
vested interests in the order which He conceived to 
be contrary to the Father's will, men who were not 
disposed to yield them. This new life that Jesus 
preached menaced their security. They were in danger 
of being found out, perhaps of finding themselves out, 
and in self-defence they resolved to crush Him. They 
did not put it so. It was in the interests of " our 
nation " that they moved, and finally in the interest 
of " Caesar " that they overcame the scruples of Pilate. 
But we are not taken in by that kind of talk when it 



ANOTHER LOOK AT JESUS HIMSELF 131 

has to do with something that happened long ago. 
The result we know. Jesus met the death of a common 
malefactor. They silenced the voice and put away 
the life that had reproached them. Organised power 
prevailed. Did it ? 

Let us imagine ourselves interested spectators of 
this conflict between Jesus and His enemies. We have 
seen the growing opposition. We know that they have 
at length made up their minds to be rid of Him, and 
that Jesus is quite aware of the position. What will 
He do ? 

He might attempt some sort of a revolution, as 
others had done. He might succeed and become 
David II. ; or if not, is there a more glorious end 
than to die in battle for the liberty of one's own nation ? 
Men say that there is not. 

This is not an idle fancy. There were nationalist 
hopes afoot, and had Jesus set about it He could have 
mustered a strong following and stayed the hand of 
His Jewish enemies. Things said in the gospels by 
the way suggest that Jesus did really disappoint the 
hopes of many in that direction. But He did not 
choose that way, and we feel that it would not have 
been consistent with what else we know of Him if 
He had done so. 

But there were other ways left. He might recognise 
the impossible position and prudently retire into 
obscurity. If He felt that He must continue His 
teaching, He might make terms with the Jewish 
authorities by putting Himself under their patronage. 
They were not all His enemies, and had He been 
willing to confine Himself to such counsels as we have 
been considering, there is no reason why He should 
not have made peace with them. Or, if that was 
impossible, He might Himself appeal to Roman power 
and Roman justice and get some guarantee of protec- 
tion. That would be sensible, for His enemies would 



132 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

be foiled, and He could continue His work. Was not 
His work and His message everything to Him ? 

We know that He did none of these things, whether 
He thought of them or not. And I think we know 
that He would have chosen the lesser way if He had 
done any one of them. But on what grounds did He 
chose the way that to all appearances meant the end 
of His work and an ignominous defeat at the hands 
of His enemies ? Was it not a giving in to wrong ? 

We can see that He did not just drift to the court 
of Pilate and the little hill outside the city walls. It 
is just as clear that He did not rush joyfully upon a 
martyr's death as the way out of a situation which 
He could no longer face. Such theological preposses- 
sions as the evangelists may have had would have kept 
Gethsemane out of the story had it not been the truth, 
let alone the awful cry upon the cross. It was a 
costly struggle, and the only conclusion we can come 
to is that Jesus accepted the cross because He felt 
that in the circumstances He could in no other way 
fulfil what He set out to do — exhibit the divine life 
in a human personality and prove the reality of the 
Kingdom of God. 

We remember some teaching of His : impossible 
teaching it seemed, destructive of dignity and almost 
an offence to justice, — teaching about turning the 
other cheek and walking two miles pleasantly when 
you had been forced to walk one, a goodwill that 
nothing could turn to resentment. Jesus held that 
this is God's way, which we find it hard to believe. 
He held that unmistakable and unconditional kind- 
ness has power to speak for itself, and will win its 
own way. This we doubt. What had it done for 
Him ? But we cannot doubt that Jesus saw God so. 
How is He to make this tremendous assertion about 
God credible — that God is invincible love ? Only by 
doing what He did. 



ANOTHER LOOK AT JESUS HIMSELF 133 

We gathered from His picture of the son of the 
Father the conception of a great and free personality 
which would shrink from no burden, in whom a passion 
for righteousness and a glowing heart of mercy were 
at one, each raised to its highest power, who would 
with undivided purpose act as a son of God and stake 
everything on the issue, and who would emerge 
victoriously from the fiercest test. How is Jesus to 
make that claim good ? How is He to prove that the 
spiritual is the real, and that the man who trusts 
himself to it has all the power of God and the inner- 
most nature of things behind him ? Only by doing 
what He did. 

It was the final proof He could offer of the genuine- 
ness of His vision, the truth of His conviction that He 
spoke from God. 

One might ask perhaps if the fact of a man's dying 
for his belief proves that he was right. Of course it 
does not in the ordinary sense. But if a man dies 
because he believes that by so doing his end will be 
gained, and we find that it is gained, it does prove 
that he was right in that belief. Jesus died, and it is 
not too much to say that He made a different world 
and gave life a new meaning. From the cross He 
conquers. And in Him God conquers. In the words 
of Paul, He showed the cross, from one standpoint a 
violent and even repulsive accident, to be the power 
and the wisdom of God. He proved that His deep 
intuition was right, and in choosing to trust to that 
we can but say that in His personality the will of God 
and the will of man were absolutely at one. 

It is the very heart of God that is laid bare for us, 
God, whose life is not receiving, but giving, not gain- 
ing, but bestowing; not self-absorption, but self- 
expression ; a joyous overflowing of Creative Love 
that accepts evil and suffering and pain, and transcends 
and conquers them all. 



134 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

The cross of Jesus is His final expression of the way 
to Personality, which is simply this : — the will of God 
at all costs. Quite apart and probably better apart 
from any theory of the atonement, the revelation made 
there at such a cost is still able to awake in the hearts 
of those who see it the conviction that Jesus has told 
us the innermost truth about ourselves. It strikes 
to the heart of us as nothing else has ever done. Our 
shabby compromises, our miserable fears of the truth 
and of one another, our selfishness, our shrinking from 
pain and ridicule, our vain attempts to rind satisfaction 
in lesser things, our flight from realities, begin to look 
what they are. It is just that sort of thing that 
crucified Jesus. These were the things He bore and 
overcame. 

We see that we have betrayed our nature. Our 
common way of life is not the way. It is nothing 
less than a denial of God. The true life we see to 
be victorious over all the things we have submitted to. 

The truth about God and the truth about ourselves 
is what the cross makes plain. When these things 
are faced and their meaning seen, we cannot evade 
the issue. Here is our true life, our true Personality; 
fellowship with God in a unity of purpose and 
endeavour. The old world in which we have lived 
must go. Let it be crucified to us and us to it, crucified 
with Jesus, that we may live with Him and know the 
power of His life. 

The cross then, is no unpleasant incident to be 
forgotten, not merely a calamitous end to the work 
of a great teacher, as the hemlock was to Socrates. 
It was necessary. Had men been different, the end 
of Jesus might have been different, but we have to 
take things as they are. 

And we have to take them as they are. We can 
see now more clearly why the way to Personality is 
not the line of least resistance. It has to be chosen, 



ANOTHER LOOK AT JESUS HIMSELF 135 

deliberately chosen, in the face of contradiction and 
opposition. We cannot enter it at all until we can 
make for ourselves a mighty spiritual assertion over 
against the " world " which ignores or denies our 
divine inheritance. Jesus has made that assertion 
on our behalf. He has died for us, to bring us to God, 
that we might make it for ourselves. 

The atonement then, far from being foreign to our 
subject, or a superfluous addition to the message of 
Jesus, is of the very core of it. 



CHAPTER II 

A NEW BEGINNING 

" What is the greatest thing ye can experience ? It is the hour 
of great contempt. The hour in which even your happiness becometh 
loathsome unto you, and so also your reason and virtue. 

" The hour when ye say. . . 'It is all poverty and pollution 
and self complacency. 1 " 

Nietzsche : Thus spake Zarathustra. 

One of the things urged aganist Christianity by those 
who hold that it denies life is that it encourages the 
sense of sin. This is its weapon against the strong : 
to persuade them that they are sinners, to induce a 
tormented conscience as part of a taming and 
emasculating process after which they are good for 
nothing but to become members of the common herd. 
It is not explained to us why the strong should 
capitulate in this way, but we may let that pass. 
"A pang of conscience is the sign that a man is not 
yet equal to his deed/' True enough, but " not 
equal " may mean that he is above his deed, not 
below it. 

Whitman has a curious lapse in this direction. In 
his Song of Myself there comes this curious passage : 

" I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid 

and self-contained, 
They do not sweat and whine about their condition, 
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins." 

He might have added another line, equally true, 
which would have made the rest look like the nonsense 
it is : 

They never even dream of reading my poetry ! 

I3« 



A NEW BEGINNING W 

"Man's misery comes of his greatness." Doubtless 
the ideal great man, always acting from within and 
always acting right, conscious that nothing could have 
been altered or improved, might be pardoned for 
wondering at the sense of sin. Only he does not exist. 
It is true that nothing that is reported of Jesus 
suggests that He felt the sense of sin, but it is true 
beyond question that He has awakened it in countless 
others. But it has to be added that He has also 
healed it. That seems to be the taming process to 
which objection is taken. Let us look at the facts of 
the case. We cannot merely swagger into Personality. 
It has to be won, and we cannot win by dodging facts. 

Christianity neither discovered nor invented the 
sense of sin. It diagnoses a common condition, gives 
a name to the disease and heals it. Its special mission 
is to assure men that the sense of sin does not mean 
that they are in the toils of some inevitable, incurable 
disease, deserted of God, but that rather God will not 
let them perish without protest. 

You do not accuse your doctor of inducing a disease 
because he tells you that you have got it and gives 
you its name, nor do you suspect him of base designs 
on your liberty if he stops you in the street and sends 
you home to bed because [he sees the signs of it 
upon you. 

When Paul tells us that all have sinned, missed the 
mark, and come short of the glory of God, he is 
generalising, doubtless. But his generalisation happens 
to fit the facts. The glory of God as we have seen it 
is that He is the great burden bearer of the universe, 
infinitely patient, kind to the evil and the unthankful, 
persistent in His purpose of good. The glory of God 
for us is that we should be sons of such a Father. 
Have we not missed it ? 

Even Nietzsche's message is : You have missed 
the mark, you have come short of the glory of the 



138 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

superman. You are weak and cowardly, human, 
all-too-human. As the ape to the man, so are you 
to the superman. He goes farther than Christians, 
and calls not only for sorrow, but for self-contempt ! 

This is not to deny that there have been times when 
Christians have nursed the sense of sin, and taken 
such morbid pleasure in it as some folk take in 
detailing their diseases. No doubt there are cases 
in which people have become self-created spiritual 
invalids. A vague general confession of sinfulness 
may develop into an unpleasant and meaningless 
habit. But these things were never learned of Jesus, 
nor even of Paul, who tells us to reckon ourselves 
dead unto sin. Even " evangelical" Christians, who 
might most of all lie open to the accusation that they 
encourage the sense of sin have, on their own showing, 
only done so that they might bring the thing to a 
head, as one poultices a boil, to give the speedier 
relief. And a part of their teaching is a " Christian 
Perfection " in which the sense of sin is entirely 
absent. The odd thing is that this teaching has 
exasperated critics even more than their "sense of 
sin." 

Sin, the sense of sin : these are no inventions of 
Christianity. They are words covering undeniable 
facts of human life and personality. We are here to 
achieve Personality. It is our own innermost demand. 
Have we achieved it ? Are we even on the sure way 
to it ? The utmost one can answer is, " More or less." 
But that means defect somewhere. It means that 
in some way we are missing the mark. And if we are 
quite complacently and with blind satisfaction missing 
the mark, are we the better off for such satisfaction ? 
There can be no hope for us until we face the truth. 

The Christian, however, does not come at the 
matter quite in that way, and he is not able to put off 
the question by saying, " Ah, well, there is limitation 



A NEW BEGINNING 139 

and defect to be dealt with, no doubt, but that is 
nothing to worry about. . The sense of limitation and 
defect will probably pursue us to the end." Original 
sin, perhaps ! 

The Christian has seen Jesus. Not that Jesus set 
about creating the sense of sin to prepare the way 
for His next move upon men, as a priest might. He 
did not as a matter of fact talk about " sin " at all in 
the large and general way that we have unfortunately 
become used to. He found some at least who were 
conscious of a burden. He offered to relieve them. 
He found others ready to obey a call, and He called 
them. He found others apparently very well satisfied 
with themselves, and thought that there would have 
been more hope for them if they had been otherwise. 
For He saw that they were really blind and did not 
know it. But what He chiefly did was to show the 
way of life and live it as had never been done before. 
He assured men that evil was not inevitable. It was 
there to be overcome, and could be overcome, but not 
by the methods in common use. Some men did evil : 
it seemed to be the only way to secure themselves in 
a world where everyone else did it. Still more 
acquiesced in evil and drifted into the doing of it. 
To some it was a burden, but the best way they could 
think of for dealing with it was to turn it against 
itself. That method sounds hopeful, and is being 
extensively practised at the present moment, but it 
never finally succeeds. You are not likely to smother 
one kind of weed in a garden by planting another. 

None of these methods can end evil. That the first 
and second cannot, needs no argument. Jesus knew 
that the third cannot. Will Satan cast out Satan? 
Jesus does not stop there, however, but shows us the 
true way — God's way. He pursues that way to the 
end, showing " the only thing which to-day proves 
whether a man has any value or not, namely, the 



140 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

capacity of sticking to his guns."* That His choice 
" to live true rather than die false " cost Him life was 
due to the fact that men refused His message. It is 
a revelation of the depths to which consent to evil 
will plunge even respectable men. But none the less, 
Jesus met evil in its most violent form and tran- 
scended it. 

The Christian is the man who has seen these things. 
Possibly the sense of division and strife within drew 
him to Jesus, in whom he sees such harmony. Or it 
maybe that the revelation of a life so satisfying 
awakened in himself a profound dissatisfaction with 
his own achievement. In either case he finds in Jesus 
the explanation of his weakness. He sees that 
discordant personality springs from consent to evil 
in one of the ways described. Consent to evil is sin. 
It is that element of consent which marks sin off from 
disease, but at the same time provides us with this 
hopeful fact, that sin is unnecessary. We can with- 
draw our consent. The realisation that we have 
consented is the sense of sin, in the Christian meaning 
of the phrase. 

As a matter of fact, so far from Christianity being 
morbid at this point, it is the most hopeful teaching 
in the world. It faces the facts and deals with them. 
If the facts are humiliating to our pride it may be hard 
to face them, but we can have no freedom until we 
do. We are only deceiving ourselves if we go off 
in sentimentalities about the strong man and so 
forth. It is the merest froth. The really strong 
men are well aware of their own weaknesses and 
failures. Their strength is in their refusal to deceive 
themselves. 

There is only one man who can afford not to know 
the sense of sin, it is the man who is living as the son 
of God. There is only one man who can have the sense 

* Will to Power, 96. 



A NEW BEGINNING 141 

of sin, the man who, because of his nature, ought to 
be living as the son of God. 

In the bottom of our hearts we know it. The desire 
for perfection, the unseen standard we judge by, the 
impulse to self-giving are there. If these things are 
not God speaking in us, the pressure of God's purpose 
upon us, then there is no God who matters. But we 
are afraid of these things. We do not know what it 
might lead to if we trusted them absolutely. It is 
too much for us to be the sons of God. Maybe we 
succeed in stifling these impulses to a great extent by 
a fever of activities, but never finally and entirely. 
We have to throw them a sop now and then, but in 
spite of that they give us many a bad quarter of an 
hour. I have seen an apparently cynical and hardened 
magistrate flush with shame on the bench at some 
reasonable appeal for mercy which the law would not 
allow him to grant. He knew. We all know : only 
we are afraid. 

Forget all the theories with which the person of 
Jesus and His work have been overlaid, and look at 
Him. You will see that Jesus was not afraid. He 
did, absolutely and without reserve, commit Himself 
and His fortunes to that within Him which He 
recognised as the voice of God. 

And you will see where it led. Mr. Bernard Shaw 
has told us somewhere that he objects to the cross as 
he objects to all gallows or any other form of criminal 
execution, and that its prominence in Christianity 
has been a calamity. One can only say that Jesus 
objected to the cross, but He objected still more to 
renounce His consciousness of God or to temporise 
with what He saw to be the will of the Father. His 
refusal so to temporise was the final triumph of God 
in man. 

The cross has been prominent in Christianity, no 
doubt, but too often as a decoration, or as something 



142 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

which meant that all the cost of making the kingdom 
of God possible has been paid, and that nothing 
remains but to acknowledge the fact. When it 
becomes prominent as a fact of experience in Christian 
life, we shall change the face of the world. 

It is the cross which more than anything else convicts 
us that when we have been talking glibly about seeking 
for God, desiring to know Him, we have often been 
running away. We see that to live the kind of life 
Jesus lived and of which the actual cross was but the 
final expression is better than to hug our personal 
security, to be private minded, to live in bondage to 
sin and isolation and fear. But we see that we have 
not always chosen that way. We have been, not on 
God's side, not on the side of Jesus, but on the side of 
such as pursued Him to His death. We have crucified 
Him afresh. 

Yet one more thing the cross of Jesus reveals to us, 
perhaps to many its greatest offence. It may be we 
have been sincere, self-sacrificing, have lived faithfully 
according to the light we have had. We have taken 
what seemed a just pride in our integrity and willing 
service, and have perhaps been ready to say of God, 
with Major Barbara : — 

" When I die, let Him be in my debt, not I in His : 
and let me forgive Him as becomes a woman of my 
rank." 

It is the one saying that does not ring true in a 
finely conceived character. That bit of swagger is 
only credible if she has enlarged her religion by reducing 
her God. If she has deserted the Father whom afore- 
time she knew for the Life Force, it is a fall, though it 
sounds so brave : for she has come to worship some- 
thing less than herself. She will not die with the 
colours. But I think the lapse is Mr. Shaw's : Major 
Barbara would have known better. 

When we stand before that last triumph of Jesus 



A NEW BEGINNING 143 

and let its meaning lay hold upon us, we find that 
we are in the presence of an ideal of righteousness 
and love so infinite and overwhelming that all we can 
boast of shrinks to nothing. We come to see that 
our only hope of achievement is the certainty that 
God will not leave us until we have won the thing He 
brought us into being for : — that is, we hope in His 
mercy, just as others must do, the poor weaklings 
upon whom we have looked down with good natured 
contempt. 

But once let things be honestly faced, and we see 
that the cross also means that the surest thing in all 
the universe is that God's purposes toward us stand 
certain and immutable. Let all the surface self- 
consciousness go, and there leaps up that of God in us 
answering back to the appeal of Jesus, and with that 
act of committal the conflict is ended. 

That is forgiveness : not the undoing of the past, 
but certainly a change in our relation to the past. Not 
the sudden stopping of all the consequences of evil. 
Not any sort of evasion. We have not escaped the 
judgment of God ; we have faced it. Forgiveness 
may mean pain, as the coming to life of a limb that 
has been asleep or the recovery of a drowning person 
means pain. But it is a coming to life, an awaking to 
sonship, a new birth. The Way to Personality lies 
open before us. 



CHAPTER III. 

PERSONALITY BY ADVENTURE 

The way to Personality is, in the sense already 
explained, a supernatural way, and its finding is the 
prelude to adventure. It is not an unnatural way or 
an abnormal way, and not the way of some semi-legal 
process or " plan of salvation." We wrong both God 
and man when we try to force this great thing into 
the limits of our schemes. That man is saved, has 
found the true way to Personality, in whose conscious- 
ness has dawned or flashed the realisation of his 
relationship to God. I have no right to say that he 
must use my words to describe his experience. He 
may never use the words repentance and forgiveness. 
He may say, with George Fox, " Now was I come up 
in Spirit through the flaming sword, into the paradise 
of God. All things were new ; and all creation gave 
another smell unto me than before, beyond what 
words can utter/' Or, if he likes it better, he may 
say with Blanco Posnet, " No more paths. No more 
broad and narrow. . . . But by Jiminy, gents 
there's a rotten game and there's a great game. I 
played the rotten game : but the great game was 
played on me ; and now I'm for the great game 
every time." 

The facts are the same. We must not make the 
mistake of thinking that Jesus set out to teach some 
new system of religion. He is the revealer of the 
heart of all true religion. He offers us Himself. He 
tells us not what He thought, but what He knew. 
He gives us His own consciousness of the Father. 

144 



PERSONALITY BY ADVENTURE 145 

Paul, who found the way to life through Him, saw 
Him to be of no less than cosmic significance. But 
Paul does not use the phrases of Jesus, or only rarely. 
Certainly we need not use Paul's unless we like them. 
Not that we are likely to find any very much better. 
I notice how men fall back upon the old words when 
the experience becomes too big for them to grapple 
with, but it is the experience that matters, not the 
phrases. 

Men may come to that experience who have never 
heard of Jesus, but it is still Christ whom they find, 
for " no man cometh to the Father, but by the Son," 
the Christ, the Word of God, who is the presence of 
God with the human race from the beginning of their 
life. And I myself will frankly say that had it not 
been for Jesus I do not know how I should ever 
have found the light at all. 

But, however it be found, the way to Personality is a 
supernatural way. Whether the conflict has been spread 
over a long period, whether it has been spasmodic, 
whether there has been satisfaction on a lower level 
until a sudden awakening came, or whether there has 
been no sense of conflict at all and the light has come 
as gently as the dawn, the result is the same : Christ, 
the true Master, has taken control and everything has 
fallen into place. Ths strong figures of a new birth, 
a new creation, are not too strong. If men have 
exhausted language in the endeavour to express their 
new found joy, it is only because they know well that 
they have come into touch with something bigger than 
themselves which has delivered them. The "great 
game " has been played on them. It is as much a 
miracle as the healing of the sick is a miracle. That 
Jesus Himself thought so is clear. 

' Whether is easier, to say to the sick of the palsy, 
Thy sins are forgiven ; or to say, Arise, and take up 
thy bed and walk ? " 

10 



146 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

I leave the Jews to settle this question, but the 
implication is that both are supernatural. And we 
have already seen that Personality itself is a super- 
natural thing. 

Now it is utterly vain for any man to deny the 
validity of these experiences. The appeal to 
experience has been called " the last ditch of the 
Christian defences." As a matter of fact it is and 
always has been the main Christian position. Any 
other sort of defence is merely an explanation, in such 
terms as are available, of the undoubted fact that 
wherever men come into contact with Christ the same 
experience recurs. From the days of Jesus until now 
it has been so, and the tale is told in every language 
the earth knows. Our explanations have been knocked 
to pieces times without number, and they will be 
knocked to pieces again, I have no doubt. But the 
experience stands, and so long as it can be repeated, 
critics do us service when they drive us to seek new 
explanations, though perhaps that is not exactly what 
they intend. 

I want to ask in my turn then : What is the essential 
thing that has happened to the man who has " found 
Christ," by whatever means he has come to that 
experience, or in whatever terms he may describe it ? 
Christians say he has been delivered, saved, redeemed, 
forgiven, justified, regenerated and so forth. What 
does it really amount to ? 

Is it merely that a bad man has become good, an 
immoral man moral, a wild man tame, — with a lot 
of unnecessary fuss ? 

No, it is not that. Jesus, at any rate, never talked 
about good and bad men, and apparently thought 
that there were worse things than immorality. The 
picture of the reprobate now become a law-abiding 
and respectable member of society is not one that 
Jesus draws, however desirable such a thing may be. 



PERSONALITY BY ADVENTURE 147 

I have heard men say that they have been bad or 
immoral, or confess to courses of conduct which would 
be commonly so described, but they do not say that 
they have become good or moral, and it is not merely 
a praiseworthy modesty which prevents them from 
saying so. It is a knowledge of what has happened. 
What they say is that they have been set free. And 
I have seen them cry for joy. I have never seen 
anybody cry for joy because he was moral or good. 

The truth is that a man may be as far from freedom, 
from Personality, by his " goodness " as the sinner by 
his badness, nay farther, if the words of Jesus mean 
anything at all. That was the case of the Pharisees, 
and the reason is that bondage which is made obvious 
by some chain of evil habit does not readily lend itself 
to complacency. Men do not go down without a 
struggle. With bondage which has no such advertise- 
ment it is easier to be satisfied, but it is no less a 
bondage. It was to a good man that Jesus said, " Ye 
must be born again." 

It is not merely a question of men becoming good. 
The new life is a deliverance. Jesus Christ sets men 
free. But deliverance from what ? 

It is deliverance from a bondage which arises out 
of the fact about man, that he is a step to something 
else. He has left behind the stage of merely animal 
consciousness, but he has not achieved Personality. 
He has not yet arrived. The first step is that of 
self-consciousness, a keen realisation that he is a 
separate individual. He draws a circle about the Me 
and the Mine. Without the realisation of that circle 
he can never engage in any act of conscious choice 
nor take even the first step to Personality. But to 
live permanently in it is a kind of suicide. It is to 
become a prey to the old animal instincts which are 
part of our inheritance, a legacy of passions and 
suspicions and self-preservative fears. If his passions 



148 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

claim him, then he becomes selfishly bad. If his 
suspicions and fears are stronger than his passions, he 
may become exactly and scrupulously moral, and tame 
beyond words. But whichever choice he makes, to 
remain in that circle is bondage and futility. Mr. 
H. G. Wells speaks of " that narrow loneliness of desire, 
that brooding preoccupation with self and egotistical 
relationships, which is hell for the individual, treason 
to the race, and exile from God."* He does not 
overstate the case. 

It is not the badness of men which cries out to 
heaven, but their futility, from which their badness 
is but an attempt at escape. If being good offered 
a more promising way they would try that, but does 
it ? Behold the immense crowd of people who have 
both gifts and good intentions, but whose lives come 
to nothing. They are not bad. No one accuses them 
of anything. They are reasonably honest, truthful, 
kind-hearted, industrious and so forth. But they are 
barren. To be a member of that crowd, cumberers 
of the ground, according to Jesus, is serious enough, 
and the more serious if the failure is not recognised. 
If it should happen that such people are conventional 
Christians, it is more serious still, because it suggests 
that their religion has not brought them the freedom 
it promised. One is driven to think that such people, 
though they do not confess it, must find their religion 
rather disappointing. Certainly they must if they 
have ever thought of it as anything more than a pious 
hobby. 

(0 you people to whom your religion is a hobby, 
you are the curse of all religion everywhere.) 

Is it any wonder that the superior vitality of the 
sinners puts them to shame, and is an attraction to 
those whose ideas of religion have been formed on the 
vision of the merely timid and respectable ? They 

* The World Set Free. 



PERSONALITY BY ADVENTURE 149 

may be able to comfort themselves with the idea that 
too much vitality is in bad taste, but they can hardly 
avoid moments when the careless and happy abandon 
of the disreputable — who merely do what they like — 
stir in them a touch of envy as well as disapproval. 
I was walking along a lane with a friend, and stopped 
to talk to a man who was cooking his meal in an old 
tin by the road side. Presently my friend asked, 
" But where will you sleep ? Have you no home ? " 
He stood up and waved his hands in a spacious gesture. 
" It's all my home," he said. 

I do not suggest that he was a bad man. He might 
well have been a strayed saint. But no one would 
think of him as a " good " man. My friend described 
him as a disreputable old scamp, but there was more 
than disapproval in his voice. 

Deliverance from futility, from barrenness, from a 
life without significance, this is the deliverance we 
need, and good people need it as much as bad people. 
The fact is that in this matter there are no good and 
bad people. There are people who find life and people 
who miss it. What Paul tells us is not that all men 
are bad, but that they all have missed the mark. 

The good may miss it by some perversion of self- 
consciousness, like that of a singer whose song is a 
failure because she cannot get away from the idea 
that there is something wrong with her dress. 

Of course it is never quite so simple as that, but 
even wears a cloak of virtue. It is, an it please you, 
our humility. We cannot put ourselves forward ; we 
cannot bear being prominent ; we will never hold 
any office ; we leave others to do the pushing ; we 
make no professions. 

Or, if you like it better, it is unworldliness. Every- 
thing is so mixed up with evil that we hesitate to do 
anything. You cannot stir a foot in any movement 
without running up against someone who has an axe 



150 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

to grind, some charlatan, some unwholesome windbag. 
We cannot bear the taint of that sort of person. We 
prefer to have nothing to do with the things that 
such people touch. And we have no market place 
tricks. Leave the cart and the big drum to people 
who like them. 

No, my friends, we cannot get off so lightly. Not 
humility, but pride is our difficulty, not unworldliness, 
but fear. 

Pride and fear. We cannot bear to be in a position 
where we may have to face criticism : we fear laughter : 
we dislike being looked at : we would rather do nothing 
than risk making fools of ourselves : we put up with 
evil rather than face unpleasantness : we dare not be 
singular and go our own way, and yet we cannot 
forget ourselves in co-operation with others. So we 
withdraw into our own shell, and gain a shabby and 
mean comfort from the idea that we could do things 
much better than they are being done, if only we chose 
to set about it. We see things evil being done, with 
contempt. We see good things being botched, with 
scornful amusement. But we do nothing. 

you fruitless, savourless, has it not dawned on 
you that you are diseased, that any price is worth 
paying for deliverance from that congested self- 
consciousness, that you had better be disreputable 
and alive than respectable and dead ! 

1 am not abusing you. I hear men slanging the 
respectable and the good, snorting with contempt at 
the tameness of their lives and the mediocrity of their 
doings, but often the only difference that I can see 
between them and their victims is that they talk more ! 

The cure is Christ, entire committal to Christ, the 
realisation in the consciousness of Christ, the true 
Personality, by whom we are sons of God. 

Not that such realisation adds magically to the 
number of our gifts, or saves us the trouble of making 



PERSONALITY BY ADVENTURE 151 

ourselves efficient in all possible ways. It is not lack 
of gifts that prevents people from being effective.fr It 
is ajTack of savour, lack of force, lack of direction, 
duetto the inward bondage that holds them back, or 
renders their endeavours futile. 

It is here that Christ is the true Saviour of men. 
To realise union with Christ is to break for evermore 
from that narrow circle. It was because Jesus saw 
how men were bound that He said such strong things 
about hating the self and all merely selfish interests 
and taking up the cross. It is the realisation of the 
same truth in His own experience which makes Paul 
describe the way of deliverance as one of crucifixion 
with Christ, and it is a misunderstanding of these 
things which has led men to describe Christianity 
off-hand as " the religion of self-sacrifice." 

For just as the Christian is set free from the law 
and finds conduct to be no longer a question of morality, 
so he has transcended the old oppositions of self- 
cultivation and self-sacrifice, self-denial and self- 
affirmation, egoism and altruism. And not, as is 
sometimes suggested, by for ever choosing one side 
against the other. The Christian is not an egoist, 
but neither is he an altruist. Christianity is as truly 
a religion of self-affirmation as it is of self-sacrifice. 

But it is not a prudent mixture of the two, for if it 
were, we should be back at once into the old conflict. 
We see no sign of any such conflict in Jesus, nor any 
hint that the problem troubled Him at all. He was 
altogether above it. 

The Christian life is expressed for us by John and 
Paul, as a life of union with Christ, that is a divine- 
human life, such as Jesus meant when He told us to 
live as sons of the Father. Each writer phrases the 
thing in his own way, but to both Christ is the divine 
nature immanent in man and revealed in Jesus. " It 
was the good pleasure of God," says Paul, " to reveal 



152 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

His Son in me." To John, Christ is the vine — not its 
root or its main stem, — and we are the branches. 

We can see what Paul meant when he describes the 
way of life as union with Jesus Christ. Paul found 
in Christ, the new man from heaven — in contrast to 
the old man of nature, his true Personality. His 
great discovery on the Damascus road was that Christ 
had appeared, the pattern of the new humanity, in 
Jesus, whom he had so bitterly hated and opposed, 
Jesus, the perfect revelation of that sonship to claim 
which involves in practice our identification with Him 
in His way of life, our acceptance of His whole method 
as our own, without regard to consequences. Jesus 
is the perfect revelation and the perfect symbol of 
the way to life. That is why to Paul the way is that 
of union with Christ in His death, but not less, union 
with His resurrection. He is " crucified to the world," 
by which he does not suggest any denial of life, but 
the reverse. He has put an end to the old evasions 
by which he saw that men so largely live. He joyfully 
embarks on a life of peril and loneliness which was 
probably the last thing he ever contemplated in his 
eager Jewish days. But he finds life and joy in it, 
there can be no doubt of that. He has somehow found 
the centre of things and lives there victoriously. His 
whole personality has been unified in Christ. Whether 
we agree with him or not, he got what we all want, a 
satisfying reason for going on, and one which calls out 
every ounce of energy in his being. And, we must 
remember, Paul's experiences did not come out of 
his explanations, but his explanations are an endeavour 
to account for his experience. 

But this " dying with Christ," does not that at once 
declare that Christianity is simply the religion of self- 
sacrifice ? 

It is just at this point that the Christian finds that 
these terms have no opposition for him. Self-denial, 



PERSONALITY BY ADVENTURE 153 

self-affirmation,-— the cross is both in the highest 
degree. 

"Whosoever would save his life shall lose it, and 
whosoever shall lose his life for my sake shall find it." 

" Except a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die, 
it abideth by itself alone : but if it die, it beareth 
much fruit." 

Both sayings occur in connection with the thought 
of Jesus about His mission as the Son of Man, and the 
first meaning is clearly that there may come a point 
when a man can only fulfil his mission by going straight 
on and ignoring the consequences. To stop to think 
about self would be fatal. We have only to ask 
ourselves what would have been the outcome had 
Jesus withdrawn or temporised at this point and 
sought to save His life. Jesus, as we have seen, went 
on. Was His going on self-sacrifice or self-affirmation ? 
Or in any sense a half and half mixture of the two ? 

The saying of Jesus is also true in this more general 
sense, that you can only possess a thing when you 
renounce it. That sounds paradoxical, but the 
parodox is only in the form. Phrase it differently, 
and say, " If we are bound to a thing we are not free," 
and you get not paradox, but platitude. When we 
can do without a thing, we can then truly possess it. 
But the man who strips himself to the soul because he 
will not be in bondage to things, — is he engaged in 
an act of self-denial or of self-affirmation ? When a 
man goes still further and says, " Let life go rather 
than I should deny the Christ within," of what use 
are our little terms to define what he does ? On the 
other hand, is the artist who fails in public because of 
a sudden attack of self-consciousness denying or 
affirming himself ? 

The truth is, he can only succeed in expressing 
himself when he ceases to think about himself at all. 
That is the Christian way. 



154 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

In all this Jesus is but the fulfilment of His own 
teaching, and the supreme example for ourselves. 
The giving up of our lives may never be demanded of 
us, but decisions involving the principle the cross 
stands for come before us every day, in however 
minor a degree. And there are points in our relations 
to others in which the matter is brought to a sharp 
and pressing issue. 

Perhaps nothing of all that Jesus said has been so 
reluctantly received as His counsels as to the right 
conduct in the face of active and aggressive evil doing. 
The way Jesus proposes has been regarded as involving 
self-denial to a point which would be self-destructive, 
or at least be destructive of self-respect. At the 
same time I have never found anyone who could 
answer this question satisfactorily: " What would 
you have said as the true counsel for such circum- 
stances?" and then, "Would you have had a higher 
respect for Jesus if He had said so ? " 

The truth about the way Jesus suggests is that it 
demands a power of self-affirmation which only the 
greatest Personality can be capable of. 

It will be well to have the exact words of Jesus. 

" Ye have heard that it was said, An eye for an eye, 
and a tooth for a tooth : but I say unto you, Resist 
not him that is evil : but whosoever smiteth thee on 
thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if 
any man would go to law with thee, and take away 
thy coat, let him have thy cloke also. And whosoever 
shall compel thee to go one mile, go with him twain." 

Immediately there springs up in the mind some 
concrete case. We imagine this teaching being carried 
out by some man who believes in it. There is a little 
episode in the street between him and another. That 
is how it is generally figured, is it not ? Our man is 
struck. What is he going to do ? The striker is 
squaring up to counter the return he expects. There 



PERSONALITY BY ADVENTURE 155 

is a pause. What is our man doing ? Has he no 
dignity ? Is he waiting for another blow ? Appar- 
ently he is. We are not quite clear how it ends. It 
seems to stop indeterminately. . . . 

Do you think I'm going to stand that sort of thing ? 

Or maybe the picture is the other favourite one : 
the helpless child in the hands of the huge bully. I 
come along in the nick of time and heroically fling 
myself. . . . But no, I am to appeal to the bully's 
finer feelings. He has no finer feelings. He meets 
my protests with curses. I plead, I weep, I even 
beseech him to cut my throat instead. Finally I 
watch him depart. ... I may even be accused 
of the murder ! 

What, sir ! do you think I'm going to do that sort 
of thing ? 

Now obviously, there is no word of Jesus or anything 
He ever did to suggest that the Christian should stand 
by and see another person injured without any attempt 
to prevent it other than a verbal one. But to make 
the amazing leaps that sometimes follow on the heels 
of that statement is unreasonable to the point of 
childishness. " Then you admit the use of force, and 
force means police, prisons, armies, navies, righteous 
wars and all the rest of it, and the only difference 
between the Christian and other people is that he 
has an ideal he does not live by ! " 

Without stopping to make answer to that, which 
would lead us too far from our subject, let us turn to 
our first case, which at least has the merit of being not 
unlike the one Jesus dealt with. 

What was our man doing that another should strike 
him ? It is an important question, for a blow is not 
generally the beginning of a difference, but the climax. 
They came to blows, we say. If the blow was merely 
an accident, to reply by another is mere ill temper, 
which probably no one would wish to defend. What 



156 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

happened before the blow ? Suppose our man to be 
pursuing some end in which he desired the other's 
good and getting a blow for his trouble. Returning 
the blow will not further that good purpose, but show 
that our man is not equal to his purpose. That is a 
failure of Personality. Suppose that he has provoked 
the blow. Then he has so far failed to be a son of 
the Father. What he does next will depend on whether 
he desires the evil which he started to cease or not, 
whether his hunger for righteousness or his feeling of 
resentment is the greater. But obviously striking 
back will not make for righteousness. 

I have dwelt on this, because the case mentioned 
is a common sort of objection to Christ's words, and 
is an example of the way in which the vital question 
as to what went before the blow is ignored. 

But it must be said that we are not likely to get at 
the meaning of Jesus, by such arguments, nor is it 
fair to pick out the illustration of physical violence 
as the thing that chiefly matters. It is not at all a 
question as to whether it is ever right to use force,* 
but something much bigger than that. 

The teaching of Jesus is a picturesque contrasting 
of the spirit of the old law with the spirit of the man 
who acts as a son of the Father. The old law recognised 
and yet put restraints upon the spirit of domination 
and revenge, the spirit which hates evil, but sees no 
way of dealing with it other than the way of retaliation. 
It is not the hating of evil which Jesus is dissatisfied 
with, but the method of meeting it. Jesus objected 
to every form of domination and tyranny, because he 
saw that they were evil : they thwart and injure the 
lives of all who are the victims of them, and they poison 
those who achieve them. His counsel is that if men 
endeavour to tyrannise over us in any way, we are 
not to endeavour to dominate or tyrannise over them 

* i.e. The use of force in itself, of course, is neither right nor wrong. 



PERSONALITY BY ADVENTURE 157 

in return, even to the extent of returning a blow. If 
we do, we show that we are approvers of the same evil 
method. But we are to show that we cannot really 
be dominated in the way they would like. They 
cannot destroy our peace of mind or our liberty of 
spirit, nor can they by anything that they do destroy 
our invincible desire to create fellowship, even with 
them. 

Now whether we prefer the old way or the way of 
Jesus depends altogether on what it is we want. If it 
is domination that we admire, other people kept in 
their places and forced to toe any line we like to draw 
for them, or if in some purely private dispute our only 
desire is to score, then we must refuse the way of Jesus 
finally. But the Christian wants righteousness and 
fellowship. There can be no victory for Him but the 
securing of these, for he has seen that his own highest 
personal life is bound up with both these things. He 
is out to fight evil, not to fight men. He desires to 
win the man, not just to win a case. There can be 
no doubt as to which is the higher aim or the greater 
adventure, nor which demands the greatest self- 
affirmation. Even Nietzsche tells us that true heroism 
consists not in fighting under the banner of self- 
sacrifice or disinterestedness, but in not fighting at all. 
How then is the Christian to win the other man, to 
abolish the enmity that has sprung up between them 
and threatens the best life of both ? The question 
when so put answers itself. To render injury for 
injury is but to increase evil. But to do nothing is 
not to conquer it. It might serve the conventionally 
" meek " man, but he is the invention of people who 
have never seen Jesus. It is no exaggeration to say 
that if there is one thing which the Christian must 
avoid in any such circumstances it is doing nothing. 

The answer of Jesus is that we must endeavour to 
transcend the evil, not merely suffer it. We must 



158 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

refuse to let our purpose of righteousness and love be 
turned aside by any man. The turning of the other 
cheek is not cowardice, but the loftiest kind of courage. 
It may represent self-sacrifice from one point of view, 
but it is equally the greatest self-affirmation which says, 
" You may go further than that and yet I shall win 
you for righteousness. For you too desire righteous- 
ness in your heart, though you may not know it. I 
shall conquer you by helping you to conquer yourself. 
And even if I fail, you shall not conquer the good 
in me." 

Striking back is child's play compared to that. 
But if you cannot by love turn the other cheek 
or walk the other mile, you had better fight it out 
than do nothing. Only do not say that striking back 
is the most courageous way or the most righteous way. 
It is only the way for those who are not big enough 
to take God's way or faithful enough to attempt it. 

Is it hard ? Truly it is, for it makes demand on 
the highest powers of Personality. It is impossible 
while we are thinking about ourselves, but it is not 
finally impossible, for Jesus did it, and in so doing 
exhibited the only way which has ever succeeded in 
winning the evil doer and at the same time conquering 
the evil. Other ways have ignored evil, and suffered 
it to grow, have restrained evil doers more or less, 
have suppressed evil doers for faults which were 
partly the result of conditions maintained by the 
suppressors, but they have not won evil doers to good 
and have never conquered evil, while they have 
invariably introduced more evils. 

We are being driven to see that revenge, vindictive- 
ness and most of what we call punishment are vain 
things, but there is only one other way, to appeal to 
and co-operate with the good in men, and that is not 
possible to the self-centred. 

We see, then, that it is not possible to exalt to the 



PERSONALITY BY ADVENTURE 159 

position of a rule of the Christian life, either self- 
sacrifice or self-affirmation, altruism or egoism, resist- 
ance or non-resistance. The son of the Father does 
not by retaliation resist injury, but he offers the 
greatest resistance to evil. He denies himself in the 
sense that he has dropped altogether the question of 
his personal comfort and even his personal dignity 
as that is usually understood. But he makes the 
most tremendous affirmation of his divine sonship 
and of his right and power to act as a son. 

The whole truth is that the way to Personality is 
both self-denial and self-affirmation in the highest 
degree. The self which is denied is the little self that 
would dwell in the narrow circle of self-consciousness 
and by fear or passion build walls about it. The end 
is barrenness and futility, a real bondage. But none 
are able to get away from that silent pressure of dis- 
content, of the Will to Personality, nor to silence the 
voice that whispers to us of the adventure to our high 
destiny. It is the call of Christ. Men feel it who 
have never heard of Jesus, but Jesus interprets it to 
us as none other can. Where the call is answered, 
the testimony, a thousand times repeated, is ever the 
same : — Christ has set me free. The hymns of the 
Christian church are one long witness to it. Even if 
it were true, as is sometimes wildly suggested, that 
Christian doctrine is the invention of the priests, it is 
difficult to find any explanation of the great hymns 
other than that they have come out of the experience 
of their writers. 

Long my imprisoned spirit lay- 
Fast bound in sin and nature's night ; 

Thine eye diffused a quickening ray, 
I woke, the dungeon flamed with light. 

My chains fell off, my heart was free, 

I rose, went forth, and followed Thee. 

No more bondage. Neither sin nor sorrow nor fear 



i6o THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

can put their chains upon us again. No more " thou 
shalt not." All things are lawful, and if all things are 
not expedient, I have the standard within. No more 
shutting up of life into separate compartments. No 
more drudgery but a joyous adventure. 

All the Christian now needs hangs upon the two 
commandments which Jesus did not invent, but 
quote, though He put a new world of meaning into 
them. 

" Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy 
heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, 
and with all thy strength." 

To God loyalty of the whole personality, loyalty 
to all those impulses by which God speaks in the 
consciousness, loyalty to every revelation of Himself 
that we can find, the whole being directed to the 
fulfilment of what we see to be His purpose in every 
sphere of life and in every human activity. In that 
response self-affirmation and self-denial, self-sacrifice 
and self-realisation, cease to have any meaning for us. 

" And the second is like unto it : Thou shalt love 
thy neighbour as thyself." 

To men, then, loyalty : not altruism, nor yet 
egoism, but the loyalty due to others who are also 
sons of the Father. That is true even of our worst 
enemies. They will cease to be our enemies when 
they realise it along with us, and our loyalty both to 
God and to man demands that we seek to bring them 
to that knowledge. Do that, and it brings entire and 
permanent satisfaction. Satisfaction is what we want, 
is it not ? 

To all men it is the loyalty which will not demand 
some exclusive good at another's cost, but would rather 
bestow, which will not hasten to take advantage of 
some accidental privilege or opportunity, but claims 
for others such things as it claims for self ; which 
does not stand apart, but realises that finally we can 



PERSONALITY BY ADVENTURE 161 

only succeed together. That is the real meaning of 
the golden rule, which has afforded such sport to smart 
epigram makers. 

I have used " loyalty " as a synonym for love, to 
emphasise the fact that the New Testament word is 
an unusual one. It is not the love of affectionate and 
familiar friendship, nor the love of man for woman. 
It is an intense and ardent loyalty. 

For the Christian this love for God and man are 
included in a passion of loyalty to Christ, in whom 
God and man are revealed. It has been well said, 
' There are three qualities which will enable a person 
to endure all hardships : — an unquestioning belief in 
a beneficent God, an absorbing love for an individual, 
or a burning enthusiasm for a cause."* 

In loyalty to Christ all these meet at a point where 
any talk of self-denial or self-affirmation dissolves in 
fire, where all foolish " self-consciousness" drops from 
us, and we find ourselves in a kingdom, not of hard 
and impossible tasks, but of that brimming love and 
joy which are the surest marks of triumphant Per- 
sonality. 

Love and joy always seek expression : they are an 
overflow. Towards God in faith and worship and 
prayer. Towards man in fellowship. 



Belinda the Backward : Salome Hocking. 



CHAPTER IV. 

PERSONALITY BY FAITH 

" There is no explanation of man that does not demand that 
his spirit is in touch with an infinite and spiritually Personality, 
in which his true life stands explained, and in conscious fellowship 
with which he alone can come to himself." 

Dr. W. E. Orchard. 

For this reason, that we are " immortal spirits walking 
among supernatural things/' we find Jesus laying the 
greatest emphasis upon faith, which is so obviously 
a personal attitude. Like Personality itself it is 
hinted at in creatures which are not personal. But 
that also we should expect, if Personality is the end 
aimed at in the creative process. 

In personal life itself faith has all degrees and 
qualities. 

There is no unbelief : 
Whosoever plants a seed beneath the sod 
And waits to see it push away the clod, 
He trusts in God. 

This is true enough, and there is no breach at any 
point, but a continuous progression from that natural 
act of faith to the highest vitality of the spiritual life. 
The God of Creation and the God and Father of Jesus 
are the same. 

What is faith then as it is related to our quest ? 

The great users of the word are Jesus and Paul, and 
to both faith is at once spiritual insight and the attitude 
of the personality which follows from it, though 
sometimes the emphasis is on the one and sometimes 
on the other. Jesus often expressed surprise at the 
inability of others to see the things that were so obvious. 

162 



PERSONALITY BY FAITH 163 

That the resources of the Father were open to men in 
ways undreamed of was clear to Him, and He 
constantly fell back upon them, with such results as we 
have seen. He was disappointed that men not only 
could not, but apparently did not particularly want 
to see them, and that, though they had His example 
to hearten them, they were " slow of heart," and shy 
of making any venture on their own account. Their 
opinion seems to have been that it was in quantity 
that their faith was lacking, but Jesus suggests that 
the lack was not quantity, but vitality. Faith as a 
mustard seed, little, but alive, can do great things. 

With Jesus then, faith is perception of the possi- 
bilities of the Kingdom of God, and the venture we 
make as the result of that perception. 

In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus shows us His 
new man in the attitude of faith as He moves about 
in the world and does His work. Faith there appears 
as a new kind of prudence. 

Since the new man is not to be put off with less than 
reality, we shall not expect him to suffer from the 
delusion that he can enrich himself by merely adding 
to his belongings. What he wants he will want for 
use, and not merely for security, still less for the sake 
of establishing a claim over others. He will serve 
God and man, but not things. Since he knows that 
what he himself most desires is the desire of the Father, 
he will not be afraid to trust himself out of doors in 
the Father's world. He will not be the prey of worry 
and fear. That does not mean that he will behave 
like a fool and then expect God or other people to 
settle his debts. Jesus recognised the physical needs 
of men. We are to pray for daily bread, and the 
lavishness with which God clothes the lily may 
encourage us to look for butter as well. But the gain- 
ing of these and other good things cannot be his end, 
they are the means by which he can fit himself for 



1 64 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

service and express the divine life within him, and 
consequently are not underrated. The new man will 
not " despise money," or count it a virtue that he does 
not know how much he has, or whether he is in debt 
or not. That may be left to the sweet simplicity of 
the Skimpoles. Rather he values such things more. 
They are sacramental things, not to be abused or 
wasted or worshipped, but used, as vehicles of service 
and self-expression. 

He will seek the kingdom in his use of them, and 
since he does not look upon them as the measured 
reward of service — not needing the " incentive to 
gain," — he will be secure in his assurance that the 
needed good things will not fail him. 

This idea is further amplified in chapter seven of 
Matthew's gospel. " Ask and it shall be given you: 
seek, and ye shall find, knock, and it shall be opened 
to you." Sir Oliver Lodge calls this the assurance 
of the ultimate intelligibility of the universe. It is 
that, no doubt, but it is also the assurance of the 
ultimate goodwill of the universe. There are no 
limitations to the goodwill of God towards us. As 
fast as we can conceive of a good, that good becomes 
possible. 

In Paul's use of the word "faith," there is a difference 
which we might expect. He looks to Jesus the Christ 
as representing both the possibilities of the Kingdom 
of God and the true relation of man to God. Christ 
to Paul is the divine nature which was manifested in 
Jesus, and in which our own true life is to be found. 
Faith in Jesus Christ means that we identify ourselves 
with the way of life and the method of life which He 
has shown us, and with the Christ who was manifested 
in Him. The fact that we have done so is our 
''justification." And to Paul, honest and consistent 
faith meant the joining with those like-minded, and 
the sharing of fortunes with the small and persecuted 



PERSONALITY BY FAITH 165 

group of men and women which at that time was the 
Christian church. 

The Old Testament way was that of the attainment 
of life through righteousness, by obedience to a law 
given from without. The New Testament way is 
righteousness through an inward life which springs 
up in us when we lay hold of Christ for ourselves. 
The new life, that is, starts with the creation of a 
unified personality and is its continuous and growing 
expression. Faith is that vision which makes it 
possible. 

For the Christian that faith was first of all awakened 
by Jesus, in whom we saw a hopeful revelation of God 
in man. This is how we could have wished to think 
of God, had we been able to do so. Jesus reveals to 
us the God of our deepest desire, the God who answers 
our highest demand. We cannot think beyond the 
God and Father of Jesus, whom He trusts so implicitly 
and with such results. Whatever our faith grows to 
it never ceases to be faith in Jesus. In the worst days 
and in their blackest hours, He is always there, that 
stedfast and serene figure, to shame our fears and put 
heart into our courage. He is the author of our faith. 
When we see what His way means for us and turn 
from our old ways, it is His hand that helps us as we 
make our venture Godward. We make for ourselves, 
through Him, the claim He made for us and showed 
us realised in Himself. Christ is formed in us also, 
a new birth truly, in which we come back, on a higher 
level, to the unity of the child whose personality is 
not yet torn with division nor smothered in self- 
consciousness. " The Spirit Himself beareth witness 
with our spirit, that we are children of God." 

Of the life which follows, faith is the very essence. 
What Paul wrote of love we may say of faith. It is 
faith, no less than love, which refuses to be discouraged 
by dark facts, whether they appear in oneself or in 



166 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

others. Faith " hopeth all things." Not that faith, 
as one sometimes hears, is blind to facts, but that it 
sees all the facts, including the reality of God and of 
our relationship to Him. It is faith in God that 
sustains faith in man, without which nothing good can 
ever be done. 

How sadly often have we seen the worker in good 
causes, so ardent a name in the beginning, so confident 
that the world only needed to hear his message, become 
at last despondent, cynical, bitter, a mere stir of 
smoke over dying ashes. Men have failed him, and 
he has no faith in God. He can do no more, and if 
he should die for his cause it is of despair. 

In Ibsen's The Enemy of the People, the doctor who 
has striven for right and failed says, " I will not say, 
like a certain person : Father forgive them for they 
know not what they do." Jesus said it, because His 
faith was first towards God, and because of that, in 
men also. They knew not, there was still hope for 
them. He would not fight them, but win them. 
Faith " beareth all things, endureth all things." 

It is Faith brings into being the good that can only 
be as the Personality is enriched from those divine 
resources in which its true life lies. It is faith which 
sees the new order and realises it. Faith " believeth 
all things." It is creative. It is in the sphere of 
Personality what imagination is to the mind. 
Imagination, mark you, not fancy, which is only a 
poor relation. 

Faith, then, is the response of the human personality 
to the divine environment in which it lives and moves 
and has its being. To have faith is to be truly alive. 
The measure of our personality depends partly on 
the gifts that we started with, but its development 
into fulness or its waste depend upon its correspondence 
with, or neglect of, the source of life. If a man is 
alive on every side but that of God, he is truly alive 



PERSONALITY BY FAITH 167 

on no side. He is out of the way of life. He is living 
upon himself, and no man can continue to do that 
spiritually any more than he can physically. To be 
alive on the side of God, to be in " definite, full, 
various, increasing correspondence with God," is to 
be on the way to whatever of Personality lies open to 
us at whatever stage we may be at. 

Faith and Personality grow together, the one 
depending upon and enriching the other. Great faith 
is the mark of a great personality. Faith in turn 
reveals and realises new possibilities, explores farther 
and farther the Kingdom of God and takes possession 
of the inheritance. " If children, then heirs ; heirs of 
God, and joint heirs with Christ." 

The things which are opposed to faith are obvious 
enough, and so is their barrenness. Scepticism has 
its place and its uses. It is well to " prove all the 
spirits," but the merely sceptical mind is barren. It 
produces nothing. The spirit of gloom and worry 
confesses its poverty in the lives and even in the faces 
of those who show it. The sluggish and half alive 
are equally self-revealing. Nothing ever comes of 
these things. They thwart life and cripple Personality 
at every turn. Nor, on the other hand, does he fare 
much better who adopts the role of the superior 
person, who allows no enthusiasm to stir him, who 
never commits himself, who is often polished and 
cultured to a degree, and suggests some cynical god 
viewing with indifference the weaknessesjof men. He 
seems superior, but he is not. In all that matters he 
is inferior to the humblest and most ignorant man who 
has one worthy enthusiasm. In the end his powers 
cancel each other. He is " splendidly null." 

But the commonest failure is, as we have seen, the 
disposition which is self-centred, which knows no world 
other than that which revolves immediately round 
private advantage. Such a disposition is self-excluded 



168 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

from life, even when most of all it thinks that it is 
obtaining it. 

The Way of Life, the Way to Personality, is the Way 
of Faith, which reaches out beyond all these things 
and knows Christ. 

Is it true to say, as is sometimes said, that faith 
itself does nothing, that it is the response of God to 
faith which makes all things possible? "I planted 
Apollos watered; but God gave the increase." True,' 
but Paul must plant, and Apollos water. Faith is 
not quiescent, but active. It is not only an attitude 
of expectancy, but loyal choice, expressed in deeds 
and efforts. 

God has put us into a world which is to be made 
over again into the world which shall express His final 
purpose of love. It is therefore full of things perilous, 
things hard and cornersome, things limiting, things 
becoming, things to be overcome. The overcoming is 
the way in which our Personality is to develop. There 
the Will to Power has field enough. 

Bernard Shaw tells us, " This is the true joy in life, 
the being used for a purpose recognised by yourself 
as a mighty one: the being thoroughly worn out 
before you are thrown on the scrap heap : the being 
a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little 
clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the 
world will not devote itself to making you happy." 

Only, personalities are not worn out, for they are 
forces of God. 

The world is full of things to be overcome, and their 
overcoming is the will of God, whose resources are at 
our disposal as we can take them. Resources not only 
physical, but spiritual, as befits personalities who are 
sons of God. Why not one as much as the other ? 
Faith takes them. 

" This is the victory that overcometh the world, 
even our faith." 



CHAPTER V. 

PERSONALITY BY WORSHIP AND PRAYER 

Worship and Prayer can scarcely be separated, even 
in thought. The note of one is delight and of the 
other aspiration, but they will always go together. 
Worship will contain prayer. Prayer which has no 
worship in it is unworthy of the name. 

Mr. Allen Upward tells us, rather contemptuously, 
that the Christian kneels to show that he is afraid of 
his God. He is quite wrong, the more surprisingly so 
that his book, The New Word, is a brilliant attempt 
to set before us the splendour of the Living God. 
The Christian worships and prays, bending his spirit, 
if not always his body, not because he is afraid, but 
for the very reason that induced Mr. Upward 
to write his book, — because he has Hope. For, as 
he tells us, " Hope is the greatest part of our environ- 
ment. It is the Pull of Heaven. It is the Energy of 
Longing." The last phrase will nearly serve us as a 
definition of Prayer, and we might fitly add to his 
discovery that a book of an idealist tendency is one of 
a hopeful tendency, the statement that such a book 
will be one of worship and prayer, whatever its 
particular form. But all sneers will be left out. 

Worship is the glad recognition of all the ways in 
which God comes to us, the reaching of the M strength 
within " to the " strength without," the acknowledg- 
ment by the human personality of the infinite 
Personality in which it has its being. The note of 
Christian worship is joy. The man who thinks it is 
fear has been taught in a bad school. 

169 



170 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

Prayer is aspiration, desire, the energy of longing 
which goes out to an order beyond that to which our 
physical life belongs, with which we can co-operate 
and which can co-operate with us. It is our desire 
after God, but equally it is our response to the desire 
of God, the pull of heaven upon us. We do not need 
to pray to bring God near to us, but only to give Him 
room and opportunity. He will never coerce us, but 
if He were not more than near, we should feel no desire 
for prayer at all. 

The Christian has no doubt about these things. He 
has found not a something, an abstraction, a vast 
impersonal presence, but the God and Father of our 
Lord Jesus Christ. Christian prayer is that of a 
liberated and unified personality which has found its 
true being in Christ, who is the divine in man and the 
human in God. At this meeting point prayer is 
possible, not just the adoration and supplication of a 
being far away, not the losing of Personality in some 
infinite ocean of being, but communion with the Father 
who has made us akin to Himself, and Whose will is 
our free development in sonship. For that reason, 
it is prayer in the name of Christ, to whom the 
Christian has committed himself. 

It is said that in these days prayer has become 
neglected, that it is often formal, lazy, wordy, insincere. 
Many people have frankly given up the practice of 
prayer because they have felt this, and because they 
have concluded that new conceptions of the universe 
have made prayer either impossible or unnecessary. 
To the example of Jesus, who certainly depended 
greatly on prayer and made the strongest assertions 
about it, they argue that Jesus had not our modern 
knowledge of the fixed order of nature. Possibly not, 
but the constancy of nature has been depended upon 
by man from the beginning. He was well enough 
aware of that. But the real point is that Jesus was 



PERSONALITY BY WORSHIP AND PRAYER 171 

not arguing for the possibility of prayer. He was 
speaking, as always, out of His own knowledge and 
experience on the matter. And just as the life He 
bade men live consisted in accepting and trusting to 
impulses to which they were already no strangers, 
but which He showed in Himself in all their glowing 
perfection, so in the matter of prayer He brings into 
clearness and interprets for us what is already part 
of our experience, — our response to the environment 
we call God, our demand upon life. 

For, whatever name we call it by, we all do pray, 
and our prayers have a singular way of getting 
answered. There is nothing in all the world more 
powerful than a persistent and strong desire. And 
our desires already go out to some order beyond the 
" natural." When we long for perfection of any sort, 
we send out a desire which crosses all the frontiers 
of our experience. We make a demand on the infinite. 
To conceive of an ideal and to desire it is to pray. 
The artist prays to an infinite beauty he has never 
seen. 

We are in a universe which responds to our desires, 
whether they are good or evil, wise or foolish, if they 
are single and sincere. But that is where many of our 
prayers fail — our foolish ones as well, happily. Because 
there is discord in our Personality, we achieve 
nothing, good or bad. It is not in us to choose the 
evil wholly, but we dare not trust ourselves to the 
good. 
' Jesus, in bringing unity to us, sets us free to pray, to 
pray in such wise that our own personalities are 
enriched and the will of the Father furthered both for 
ourselves and the world. 

But before pursuing further the relation of Prayer 
and Personality, there are one or two elementary 
things that need to be noted, because even Christian 
people are sometimes led astray by forgetting them. 



172 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

We have no reasonable right to expect that prayer 
will give us demonstration of matters of fact which 
have to be settled on evidence, or which could be 
verified by inquiry, or that it will supply us with 
knowledge which by its nature is the product of study 
and experience. Prayer is not a substitute for action. 
It is, as John Masefield finely says, " the creative 
thought before action." It liberates our powers and 
sets us free to act with decision and certainty, but as 
a refuge for the lazy and incompetent it is a dis- 
appointment. 

Nor can we expect by prayer to induce a change 
in the purpose of God. Our one hope is that His 
purposes do not change. 

Nor may we hope that God will coerce the will of 
others because we pray, or that He will coerce us, 
even though we ask Him to do so. He will not take 
from us the responsibility of choosing. For example, 
I received the other day a leaflet asking me to pray 
that God will " stop the war." I have no wish to be 
uncharitable or dogmatic, but it appears to me to be 
nonsense to talk like that, if some kind of special 
intervention is meant, as the words seem to imply. 
God did not start the war, and we have no reason to 
expect that He will stop it. To rush to prayer and 
endeavour to evade results for which our own dis- 
obedience is largely responsible does not fit in with 
anything that we can discover in the ways of Jesus. 

For the rest, let us pray, always as children, knowing 
that some of our prayers may be foolish and impossible, 
but not, I think, witholding the desires of our heart 
because we are not sure. We shall learn His will 
by praying, if we are sincerely in search of it. We 
can be sure that all good things are His will for us, 
all that is needful to us, whether spiritual or material, 
for the fulfilment of His purposes, as well as the needed 
sense of direction. If it be asked why we should pray 



PERSONALITY BY WORSHIP AND PRAYER 173 

at all if these things are both necessary and sure, it 
must be said that the end of prayer is not to call God's 
attention to us, but to put ourselves, by our own free 
choice, into such an attitude that God can speak to 
our need, and that, in the case of spiritual good, 
prayer is the fitting of ourselves to receive at God's 
hands. But that brings us back to the relation of 
Prayer and Persorality. 

Personality helps prayer. It is the measure of the 
reality of our prayer. We have already noticed in 
general terms the fact that urgent prayer can scarcely 
come from a divided and distracted personality, where 
desire clashes against desire. " A double-minded man 
. . . let not him think he shall receive anything." 
It is clear that perfect sincerity with ourselves must 
be the first condition of prayer. It is easy to deceive 
ourselves, to pray for some positive good which we 
do not desire at all costs, to pray for deliverance from 
some defect to which we yet cling, to imagine we are 
repentant of some evil temper which we may have 
discovered in ourselves when we are only distressed 
at the unpleasant consequences which we have brought 
down upon our heads. There is little hope for us until 
we are absolutely honest and undivided, that is, can 
truly pray in the name of Christ. 

" The easy-going notion that certain qualities can 
be exercised in prayer that do not exist in the character 
— can be summoned by magic, as it were, and 
introduced into a man's prayer when they have no 
existence in his ordinary life — is a fallacy that widely 
prevails and has many unconscious victims."* 

The desires of a distracted character must needs 
be few and feeble or else contradictory. It seems to 
be for this reason that Jesus so emphasises the need 
for persistence in prayer. It cannot be for any reason 
in the nature of the Father. Of the things we pray 

* Swetenham : Conquering Prayer, p. 25. 



174 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

for, we may ask ourselves, Do we really want this ? 
Is it the sincere desire of our personality ? Have we 
counted the cost and assured ourselves that we are 
willing to face all the consequences ? Are we taking 
steps to prepare ourselves in all other ways for receiving 
the answer and using the gift we are praying for ? 
Can we be trusted with it ? These are not small 
matters. Our persistence is the guarantee that these 
questions can be satisfactorily answered. 

And, do we keep on wanting it ? Is it a temporary 
enthusiasm that is soon cold and forgotten, or some- 
thing of a passion ? How many of our enthusiasms 
are chilled by a little waiting ! Yet it is of the nature 
of a spiritual gift that it cannot be given until we can 
receive it. The teacher can give a pupil sixpence at 
any time if he has the willingness — and the sixpence, 
but he has to take the lessons in order, and, however 
great the boy's desire to read Latin, he must begin 
with the first declension. Prayer is not a casual 
thing, it is a going out of the whole personality to God, 
heart, mind, soul, and strength. If there is not a full 
agreement amongst all these the prayer is limited 
thereby. It is only he who has made the ultimate 
surrender, who is absolutely committed to God, who 
can begin to know all the possibilities of prayer, and 
only as a personality is enriched and developed will 
these possibilities unfold themselves. 

Prayer helps Personality. That is the encouraging 
truth on the other side. Personality has to be won. 
For often when the central defences are down, a kind of 
guerilla warfare goes on in the outlying parts, " till 
all are subdued." And, since the unified personality 
is but the beginning of a life open to endless develop- 
ment, there is no point at which our very life does not 
depend upon communion with God. But, whether 
we have gone some way on the journey or are at the 
very beginning, or even have not yet begun, that 



PERSONALITY BY WORSHIP AND PRAYER 175 

Personality is there, our true self, a unique expression 
of God, to be trusted and valued and realised, never 
to be despised or cast aside for the imitation of some 
other that has impressed us. To listen for the voice 
of God as He speaks within, and to obey at any cost, 
that, Jesus has shown us, is the way of life. And it 
is only as this is done that we may come to the 
knowledge of higher reaches of experience, and to such 
power of Personalty that greater powers can flow 
through us. The teaching and example of Jesus 
suggest that there is no limit yet perceivable to the 
powers of which Personality is capable, but His example 
and the experience of those who have followed Him 
farthest teach us that we can only know this as we are 
willing to pay the price. Prayer is not a luxury, it 
is not mere passivity, it is the whole energy of being 
going out to God in obedience and longing. It does 
not bring God to us, for there is no need, but it enables 
Him to speak within more and more fully, and to enrich 
our nature by His fructifying power. We grow in 
likeness to our Father, in the love that bestows, in 
certainty as to His will, in conscious power to express 
His purposes, in mastery over life and environment, — 
that is, in Personality. 



CHAPTER VI. 

PERSONALITY BY FELLOWSHIP 

" Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge 

that pass all the argument of the earth, 
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own, 
And I know that the Spirit of God is the brother of my own, 
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women 

my sisters and lovers, 
A nd thai a kelson of the creation is love." — Whitman. 

It must have become obvious to us at an early stage 
in our study that the way to Personality is not likely 
to be found in any kind of exclusiveness or separation, 
and all we have learned of it since will have confirmed 
that idea. But possibly the insistence on things 
which are apparently so purely individual in the last 
few chapters may have seemed to contradict it, and 
to have given us another sort of picture, that of a 
private minded individual whose sole concern is his 
own spiritual development. If that is so, it is only 
because of the necessity of dealing with one thing at 
a time. Certainly the Christian in one aspect may be 
called an individualist, but if he is not equally emphatic 
on the other side he has missed at least half of his 
religion, and has badly mutilated the half that is 
left to him. 

If Jesus possessed a consciousness of God that, so 
far, men have had to regard as unique in its vividness 
and constancy, it was in His attitude to men that it 
was practically shown, and we cannot forget that He 
chose for Himself the title Son of Man, so witnessing 

176 



PERSONALITY BY FELLOWSHIP 177 

not only to His claim of sonship for all men, but also 
to the fact that He had a sense of intimate relationship 
to all, and was so much at one with them that He could 
speak for all. 

And the Kingdom of God, under which figure He 
proclaimed the fullest life, is also a family, for the 
King is the Heavenly Father. The ideal life may be 
compared to family life, in which each member gains 
Personality by sharing to the full the common life 
of all, making his contribution and being himself 
enriched at the same time. Since there is room for all, 
and enough for all, isolation and greediness are stupid 
as well as unpleasant. In the small circle of the family 
this is obvious enough, but in the larger world men 
are not yet fully persuaded of these things. None the 
less, the old, old mistake, which has cursed man from 
the beginning, the idea that having is the way to 
being, is no more admirable or life giving when followed 
in high matters than when it is shown in greediness 
at the table. It seems to promise fulness of life, but 
what it does produce is a form of self-complacent 
stupidity which is the most hopeless thing in the 
universe. It is not a step forward to something higher, 
but a set-back to the days when a savage imagined 
that he really added something to himself by drinking 
the blood of his enemy. 

The end which Jesus set before men is no selfish 
or merely individual end. The improvement of the 
type Man, which Nietzsche rightly conceived to be a 
noble mission, is not to be brought about by the 
production of a few powerful beings who look down 
upon the common herd, yet, nevertheless, need the 
herd to maintain them in their position. That in 
itself shows a greatness which is not native, when all 
is said. Nietzsche himself uses the figure of those 
climbing plants " which encircle an oak so long and 
so often with their arms, until at last, high above it, 



178 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

but supported by it, they can unfold their tops in the 
open light, and exhibit their happiness."* 

It is not the resentment of slave morality, but 
ordinary good sense which describes this kind of plant 
as a parasite. 

Jesus desired to elevate the type Man. He 
recognised, however, that the only way in which that 
was possible was by the elevation of all men. The 
genius comes out of a high level of common life. 
Nietzsche was more right than he knew when he 
suggested that the great man depends for his existence 
upon the common folk. If he sees farther than 
they do, it is because he stands on their shoulders. 
The higher they stand, the higher will he be. But 
if he is there, not to see for them, but to be carried 
by them, then he is the last person on earth who 
is likely to improve the type Man, for he is himself 
degenerate. 

To increase life for all, to enlarge the field of 
Personality for all by the utmost fellowship, is the 
right direction, surely. It will take all of us, working 
together in harmony, to realise the victory of the 
Son of Man, and we shall individually find our fullest 
life, the fulfilment of our will to Personality, not in 
exclusiveness, still less in exploitation, but in flinging 
ourselves joyfully into that endeavour. It is a further 
illustration of hat Jesus meant when He said, " He 
that loveth his life shall lose it." 

Not only so, but to the sons of the Father, any sort 
of isolation is impossible. It is not Father-like. In 
the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus refers to the traditional 
oppositions which divide men, oppositions of class, 
race, faith, and so forth. In His own day they were 
well marked, and we know that He created offence 
by ignoring them and seeking friendship with the 
disreputable. This was new in a teacher. The type 

* Beyond Good and Evil , 258. 



PERSONALITY BY FELLOWSHIP 179 

of piety which claimed the highest place was distinctly 
and proudly exclusive. It was for the Pharisees that 
Jesus reserved His hardest names. 

" Hypocrites ! " 

If they deserved the name it was not that they 
professed virtue to cover a life of vice, but because 
they were " actors," as the word implies. The part 
they played was not really the expression of their own 
personality, however sincerely they may have adopted 
it. The sincere humbug is the most dangerous kind 
of humbug. And their " part " was that of the 
separatist, who maintains his own virtue by exclusive- 
ness ; to put it bluntly, by snobbishness. This is 
always the temptation of the pious, both of the weak 
who, seeing evil and fearing to meet it, seek the refuge 
of some little circle in which they can maintain their 
integrity by reducing life to its smallest terms, and of 
the stronger who make themselves rules and shut 
themselves up against those who will not be bound 
by them, or maybe attempt a domination over others 
for what they conceive to be the others' good. Often 
the separation takes the form of drawing a line about 
certain human activities. These are permitted. 
Beyond the line everything is taboo and belongs, 
together with the people who engage in it, to the 
devil. Such people are " outsiders," along with 
those who are of another class, faith, or nation, or 
whose customs and habits are for any reason unfamiliar 
or repellent. 

The standpoint of Jesus is, briefly, that there are 
no outsiders. The new man is to be God-like in his 
inclusiveness, perfect even as the Father is perfect. 
How else can he be the son of the Father ? It is a 
narrow and limited personality that is afraid of others, 
a tame and weak personality that dare not venture 
out of the shelter of its exclusiveness or step off the 
platform of its privileged position, a poverty-stricken 



i8o THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

personality that is bored the moment it comes in touch 
with other interests than the little round with which 
it is most familiar. 

All exclusiveness means limitation of Personality. 

We are told that the " great man " must be lonely. 
If his greatness is native, greatness of a personality 
that is richer and can see farther than others, no doubt 
he is lonely in that he cannot find others to share all 
his vision. He may on that ground be subject to 
misunderstanding. But while others cannot enter into 
his secret, he can enter into theirs, and his solitude will 
not limit him. Moreover he will unceasingly strive 
to bring others to his level of vision. But if the " great 
man " is alone because he desires to be separate from 
others, then he is self-limited. 

But further, the " great man " will " wear a mask." 
He will be unwilling to let the common herd share his 
secret and befoul his stream with their muddy feet. 
He will hide from them in proud reserve the thing 
they cannot understand, and in his dealings with them 
will exercise a masterly dissimulation. Indeed, Mr. 
J. M. Kennedy tells us that Nietzsche himself wore a 
mask, and that being no meek-looking professor, but 
an imposing figure with a heavy military moustache, 
he habitually spoke in a very low voice to counteract 
the effect of his fierce appearance. A clean shave 
would have been much simpler. B at perhaps Nietzsche 
was not quite so fatuous as his biographer would have 
us believe. 

Is it the great, or the less than great, who cultivate 
an exterior manner which hides the real person, and 
conceal themselves from their fellows ? If we believe 
that our personality is God's special expression of 
Himself in us, it is a wrong kind of self-denial to 
hide it. It is truly a denial of life. To adopt, as 
some of us do, a rough manner to hide a warm heart, 
or to be willing to let such continue on the excuse 



PERSONALITY BY FELLOWSHIP 181 

that it is our temperament, is to dishonour the divine 
thing within us. If it is evil we hide, we have seen 
the remedy. 

The Pharisees "wore a mask." That is literally 
the accusation of Jesus against them. He Himself 
was open as the day. He met men in the frankest 
fellowship, and spoke to their hearts by revealing 
His own. 

Enlarge your circle, for that is the true Yea-saying 
to Life. Let there be no man breathing by whose 
side you cannot sit in frank fellowship, so far as your 
part goes, or to whom you cannot give loyalty and 
service. Let there be neither patronage to the low, 
servility to the high, resentment of the wicked, nor 
domination over the weak. This is the way to 
Personality : Ye therefore shall be perfect, as your 
heavenly Father is perfect. 

It is not too much to say that this ideal of fellowship 
may be taken as a working standard of value in all 
questions of human relationship, and in the end all 
problems, social, political, industrial, economic, sexual, 
international, come to that. Of any existing situation, 
and of any proposal to modify it we may ask, and if 
we are Christians must ask, — Is this the way to promote 
fellowship ? The Christian who judges by any lesser 
standard is likely to be in the wrong camp, or if in 
the right camp, for wrong reasons. Tolstoy goes so 
far as to make this value the test of good art, and 
though one may disagree with many of his judgments 
in detail, and think that he is narrower than his 
principles demand — as is his way, yet so far he is 
right, in that exclusive art is never the greatest art. 

Jesus Himself carries this principle to the utmost 
limit, and tells us that denial of fellowship and hard- 
ness of spirit are alone sufficient to shut men out of 
life. The Son of Man is honoured by those who have 
sought fellowship with such as most needed it. He 



182 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

is dishonoured by and condemns those who have 
denied it. 

" Inasmuch as ye did it not unto one of these least, 
ye did it not unto Me." 

When we ask, what is the observable practical 
difference between Jesus and others, there is but one 
answer. Jesus, without hesitation or reserve, obeyed 
that impulse to fellowship which He found within 
Himself, because He recognised it as the clear voice 
of God. We are afraid to do so, hence often, when 
we claim to be looking for God, as those who were 
condemned claimed, we are fleeing from Him, and 
from the way of life. 

What then of the Church ? Is not the Church by 
its very nature exclusive ? It seems to imply a ring 
fence, some sort of discipline, certain rules, which 
shut out those who are not prepared to accept them. 
Ought there, in the face of the teaching of Jesus, to 
be any Church at all ? 

We can best answer these questions by considering 
what the Church is. 

The Church is the company of believers, the com- 
munion of saints. Like draws to like all the world 
over. The man in whose heart the consciousness of 
sonship has been born will seek the company of those 
of like experience. He may do this primarily for joy's 
sake, to communicate his treasure, especially if, as is 
probable, it came to him through contact with some 
personality already in such a fellowship. He will 
seek their company also that his experience may be 
confirmed and enlarged by contact with others. 
There is nothing that is necessarily narrow or exclusive 
in so doing. 

The new man will seek fellowship with all men, 
everywhere, but it takes more than one to make 
fellowship, and in many ways he may find it difficult 
to live in fellowship with others for their lack of 



PERSONALITY BY FELLOWSHIP 183 

response. He is not to give up on that account, but 
it is a necessity to the development of his personality 
and to its expression that he should be able to enter 
with some into a really mutual and spiritual fellowship. 
That means the need of some sphere where the turning 
of the other cheek and all that stands for is not 
necessary. The Church provides such a fellowship, 
or should do so. The counsels Jesus gives about 
dealing with an offender who is a " brother " are 
quite different from those which relate to the aggressive 
evil doer, because they imply such a fellowship as 
existing or having existed, and the one object in view 
is its restoration. 

Some such fellowship as the Church provides is 
necessary then, that our personality may find free 
room for growth on the new lines, and be saved from 
the danger of running off into mere eccentricity, which 
is so wasteful of strength and so often leads to bitter- 
ness of spirit. We gain the needful discipline of living 
with others, of co-operation in common ends and the 
advantage of common worship. It is true to the facts 
to say that where the inspiration of Christ has been 
most felt, men have sought fellowship because they 
could not do otherwise. 

The Church is the body of Christ. This is a Pauline 
figure, and truthfully expresses, within its limits, the 
idea that the whole company of those who have found 
their true Personality in Christ are now to be to the 
Creative Will what Jesus was in the days of His flesh, 
the willing body by which He may express Himself 
in the world. This is not the denial of our personality, 
but its fullest realisation in fellowship with one another. 
And it is in no sense exclusive, for the whole truth is 
that every man is a member of the body of Christ, 
conscious or unconscious, and will find his true 
personality there, or in another figure, all men are 
branches of the great tree of life which is Christ. 



i8 4 THE WAY TO PERSONALITY 

Our realisation of that brings us into the closest 
fellowship with others who realise it, but it also 
gives us a new sense of union with those who do 
not. For now we see all men in Christ, and Christ in 
all men. 

The Church is the divine army, but it counts no man 
among its enemies. If there are those outside, it is 
only that they may come inside. If there are those 
who oppose or even persecute, it is only that they 
may be won. The enemies of the Church are the things 
that isolate and divide men, the things that cripple 
and thwart men, the things that keep back the 
Kingdom of God. It can have no other enemies 
except by creating them for itself. The "churches," 
whatever they may be, should be but points here and 
there where such a fellowship is focussed, small 
prophecies and examples in little of the life of the 
perfect kingdom, schools of Personality, members of 
the divine body. 

If they are at any point narrow or exclusive, if 
their special witness ceases to be emphasis on what 
they have seen and becomes an interdict against 
what they have not seen, or a denial of the validity 
of what others have seen, then they have forgotten 
their place and fallen into the sin of the Pharisee. 

That this spirit has often marked the Church is sadly 
true. The various denominations are made up of the 
successors of those for whom at some time " the 
church " has been too narrow and exclusive, and that 
chiefly on some minor point. One might expect those 
who had so gone out to be wider in their sympathies, 
but it is seldom so. They have often rejected one 
narrowness to cling the more fiercely to another. A 
truly catholic church, as broad as the mind of Jesus, 
would yet be an irresistible attraction. But meanwhile 
awaiting and working for that consummation are those 
in all the churches, children of light, sons of the Father, 



PERSONALITY BY FELLOWSHIP 185 

who recognise one another and join in spirit over the 
walls that seem to divide them. 

There is a point of danger here. It is tempting to a 
man to say, " I will have no part in this exclusiveness. 
I will live as a son of the Father in fellowship with all 
men. Where I find those in the churches whose 
sympathies are not merely sectarian and parochial, 
I will rejoice with them, but I will keep outside all 
their organisations." But this is not really a way out. 
Its result is only a new kind of narrowness, another 
new sect, though it may have but one member. 

The exclusiveness of others need never shut us in, 
indeed it cannot, when the consciousness of God comes 
home to us. The barriers that were about us have 
been for ever broken down. Love, we find, has given 
us a new understanding. We see men differently, we 
can approach them differently. Behind every face the 
Son of Man greets us : the Son of Man, who is the 
Christ, the Son of the Living God. 

The last word then is this : The Way of Life, the 
Way to Personality, is the way of Love. To know 
that is much more important than to agree — or dis- 
agree — with any other thing that has been written in 
this book. 



APPENDIX A. 
BY WAY OF APPLICATION 

I. — The Need for Christian Thinking 

" What's Past is Prelude." There will be hope for 
the Christian and the Church when they are finally 
convinced of that. What remains to be done, and each 
generation must bear a hand in the doing, is the 
translation of all that we have seen into the terms of 
the life of to-day. Not just the terms of thought, 
but the terms of action. Our business is not the 
imitation of Jesus, but the expression of Christ in 
whatever language and activity is ours. Our mistake 
is that we have stopped at saying, ■" This is what 
Jesus said ; this is what He meant : admire, believe, 
and be saved." We have stopped, that is, just where 
we should have begun. 

The notes that follow are by way of suggestion as 
to how the principles I have expounded might work 
out in action. I scarcely expect to find that all 
Christians will agree with my suggested applications, 
even if they have gone so far as to agree with my 
exposition of what Christ stands for. But to me they 
seem to follow naturally, and will at any rate serve 
for discussion. 

There can be no doubt that the interpretation of 
Christ to this generation and a practical application 
of what we find will make the greatest demand upon 
our loyalty both to God and our neighbour. There 
are no changes for the better which do not threaten 

187 



188 APPENDIX 

the security of somebody. Every r e-adj ust ment means 
temporary inconvenience at the least, and sometimes 
the endeavour to put into practice what we have seen 
will look very much like sawing off the branch we are 
sitting on. 

Our first duty, however, is to do some honest 
thinking. 

It is amazing that numbers of Christian people 
find so little in their religion in the way of a 
standard of judgment. Yet Christianity does stand 
for certain things which are not indefinite, and 
for certain ways of realising these things. How 
then does it come about that it is quite possible for 
a church to be conscious of a painful division on some 
matter of party politics, and that it is so often thought 
to be impossible to have any convictions on political 
matters other than party ones ? Indeed it has well 
nigh come to this, that the preacher must not mention 
in the pulpit any matter which is the subject of 
political discussion, lest he should be thought to take 
sides with one or other of the parties. That means 
practically that he must not attempt to apply Christian 
principles to any living issue. 

Surely it is time that Christians began to think 
for themselves as Christians, and to attempt to dis- 
cover what the religion they profess involves in this 
or that matter. I do not say that it will be always a 
simple matter, but at least Christians might make 
some united attempt to discover what the Christian 
way is, before they rush out under party flags in 
opposition to one another. There is neither love nor 
sound mind in proclaiming to all men that first of all 
we are Liberals or Conservatives or Socialists or 
Capitalists or Labour men or Imperialists or Sectarians 
or even Patriots — and then, Christians. When we 
learn to think as Christians we shall begin to count 
for something. 



APPENDIX 189 

II. — The Christian Community 

The business of a Christian Community is to create 
and maintain conditions most helpful to the develop- 
ment of Personality, to encourage the finest 
personalities. Its ultimate value is in its power to 
express corporately the highest type of personal life. 
To that end the widest possible freedom is necessary, 
since Personality, by its very nature, can never be 
forced. We hear about the rights of the community 
over the individual, but what is generally involved 
when this phrase is used is the claim of a certain part 
of the community — the articulate, comparatively 
leisured, moneyed part — to direct and control the rest 
Why should they ? Have they really given so much 
proof of superior wisdom ? 

A truly representative community, based on fellow- 
ship, would have ample acknowledgment of its rights, 
for it would seek the highest good of all, and not merely 
play off one interest against another and ignore the 
inarticulate. And the individual would find his own 
rights in that acknowledgment. It would be his joy 
to recognise that he belonged to the commuity and 
the community to him. But what has been done 
to induce that feeling so far ? Hitherto the community 
has regarded men very much as stupid and selfish 
parents regard their children. They are the " good " 
who give them no trouble. 

Immense appeals are made to the patriotism of the 

common man when the established order of things is 

in danger from foes without. When shall he be looked 

upon as a fellow and truly taken into partnership in 

the common war against foes within, and in the 

building up of a great community of free personalities ? 
* * * * 

Fellowship. — It will be clear that by fellowship 
is meant something very much more than universal 



190 APPENDIX 

nd reciprocal geniality. It means a mutual effort 
to enlarge the possibilities of life for everybody, and 
through every human activity, agriculture, industry, 
business, research, education, art, literature, religion. 
It means the frankest fellowship in discussion and 
criticism as well as in endeavour. It means the 
elimination of all the merely selfish, sectarian, official, 
class and clique points of view. In all things seek 
the man and in the man seek the Christ. 
* * * * 

Subsistence. A community that is Christian would 
make it a first business to see that a sufficient subsist- 
ence is available for every one of its members. That 
should be guaranteed. If it found those who were 
willing to accept that without showing any inclination 
to respond by willing service, it would have to devise 
ways of wanning them to a better state of mind. It 
would also seek to make sure whether the " shirker " 
was really to blame. It is at present highly creditable 
to the self-respect of men that they object to some of 
the conditions by which they are expected to earn 
their bread. In a decently organised community 
shirkers would be extremely rare. Self-expression is 
a necessity even now, and if all the energy that is 
turned inwards and wasted on mere self-preservation 
— the energy of fear — could be saved, there would be 
few lazy people. 

* * * * 

Equality. — We are not hastily to conclude that 
there will be neither inequality nor rank in the Kingdom 
of God. True, they are to be measured by very 
different standards than those in vogue. Rank is to 
be measured by service and by readiness to serve, 
and those who have so earned distinction will be the 
last to insist on it or even to claim it. It is the kind 
of rank that speaks for itself and needs no decoration. 



APPENDIX 191 

Jesus was not blind to the diversity of gifts, but He 
shows us in all ways that privileges mean responsi- 
bilities and not favours. As to " the equality of all 
souls before God," it would seem wise to leave that for 
God to settle. We are all to be the sons of the one 
Father and so brothers. Brotherhood does not of 
necessity mean equality, save in the sense of equality 
of opportunity to be at one's best and the equal right 
to be considered a person — and, indeed, this is all 
the equality that matters. It often should mean 
guardianship, it may mean at times vicarious suffering, 
but it never means less than loyalty and it always 
means fellowship. One thing it never means, that is 
domination. 

•I* *i* *t* *»* 

Women. — Since the Christian Community is founded 
on the idea of the development of Personality in Fellow- 
ship, women will naturally have an equal voice with 
men in its management, for on this view of the 
community the last shred is gone from the only excuse 
that ever had a rag of reason to cover it — I mean, 
that women cannot fight. The emphasis will be on 
rearing men, not on killing them. It is in the matter 
of rearing men that communities have hitherto so 
woefully failed. The proportion of waste has been 
altogether beyond what is reasonable. Women, one 
imagines, will not be so willing to see their costly 
sacrifices nullified by stupid laws which repress evil- 
doers — of some kinds — while they ignore evil conditions. 

On the Christian view, when we have exhausted all 
that can be said of woman as lover, wife and mother, 
and have added yet more on her possibilities as object 
of desire, housekeeper, provider of cheap labour, 
political tout and so forth, we have still left unsaid a 
fundamental thing, that she is a child of God. 

Frank fellowship on that understanding, or at any 
rate with that understanding never forgotten, would 



192 APPENDIX 

save both men and women much of the tragic suffering 
which comes from the idea that the emotional 
disturbance of mating is the highest possible relation- 
ship between them. 

* * * * 

Philanthropy. —What is known as Philanthropy 
is not of necessity Christian. There may be a love 
of men merely as specimens to experiment on or as 
objects to be cleaned and tidied up — for their own 
good, of course. The best life of the community is in 
some danger from a type of philanthropy which is 
above all things domineering and meddlesome, a 
passion for managing people. Those who have that 
passion should work it off on their equals and not on 
comparatively defenceless people who cannot escape. 
The philanthropist of that type " objects to the 
habits " of others, but that is no reason why he should 
provide them with such satisfying grounds for hating 
his. He is like an unintelligent auntie trying to make 
a small child happy, only ruining everything by 
insisting that the child shall be happy in the auntie's 
way ! 

Of course, helping people on these lines is both 
easier and cheaper than the way of fellowship, but the 
results also are those which attend the easy and the 

cheap. 

* * * * 

Discipline. — The Christian idea of discipline is 
that of fellowship. The discipline which is being 
extensively called for (by the people who expect to 
control it) is of another sort altogether. People 
complain bitterly that there is no discipline nowadays, 
but the discipline of fellowship is one under which they 
also would come, and they do not so greatly fancy that. 
I hear employers and people in similar position talk as 
if they ought to have the powers of a warship's com- 
mander, but not his responsibilities. If one should 



APPENDIX 193 

ask what is meant by the discipline of fellowship, I 
refer him to anybody who has kept terms in a college 
or shared the life of any similar institution. The 
discipline of fellowship helps to create free and 
responsible personalities : the discipline of domination, 
machines, noodles, or something worse. When a man 
has been compelled to " toe the line " by some power 
quite outside himself, any virtue that toeing a line 
may have has disappeared. 

* * * * 

Legislation. — The Christian must always be shy 
of merely repressive legislation. That the weak and 
helpless should be protected, and that no one shall be 
allowed to make himself a centre of infection is well, 
but the surest way to gain those ends is to remove 
the conditions under which abuses spring up and 
flourish, not to ignore the conditions and then violently 
repress the base minded who take advantage of them, 
and who, themselves, are often victims. Repressive 
legislation is often hysterical — witness the impassioned 
demanders of flogging in connection with the agitation 
against the " White Slave Traffic " — and the real 
sinners are not as a rule the ones who are pinched by 
it. A small child shivering in the cold on the doorstep 
of a public house may be taken as the type of this 
result, which was not in the least what was intended. 

* * * * 

The Christian Community and the State. — The 
State as we know it does not by any means satisfy 
these standards. It is a compromise at higher or 
lower points between the Christian and non-Christian 
ideals. In what relation is the Christian to stand to 
it ? There are those who would have us be altogether 
apart, exercise no vote, take no part in public affairs, 
but simply live as Christians in a non-Christian com- 
munity. There is something to be said for this, no 

13 



i 9 4 APPENDIX 

doubt, for, though the Christian shares in the pro- 
tections and advantages of the state, he suffers no less 
from the disadvantages of living under conditions in 
which his standards are not practically recognised. 
But that way of separation is too much like a reversion 
to the way of the Pharisee. Surely the business of 
the Christian is to bear witness to his standards in 
every department of life. This can be done in most 
cases because there is nothing to prevent the Christian 
giving more of himself than the state demands. Is 
not that part of the idea of Jesus ? If the law demands 
a mile, it cannot prevent us from going the two miles 
if we are willing. 

At the same time the Christian must beware of 
finding himself in a position where he will have to do 
in some representative capacity what his conscience 
as an individual condemns. There are compromises 
which are merely matters of opinion or of administra- 
tion, but there are others which are a denial of Christ. 
The Christian has no liberty to hide Christ by consenting 
to unrighteousness under an official hat — the hat which 
renders its wearer invisible. 

There seems to be considerable room in all directions 
for groups of men who will represent the Christian 
view, continually insist on it, and so screw up the 
official standards, but meanwhile themselves consist- 
ently refuse to be put into official positions which 
would immediately destroy the value and even the 
possibility of their witness. The Christian is to be 
like leaven, but the leaven, though hid in the meal, 
is not overcome by it. 

It is a difficult position, but should that put off the 
Christian ? 

And there may be occasions when the only thing 
remaining possible to the Christian is the refusal to 
share in some activity of the state which means to 
him the denial of his own conscience. Before he comes 



APPENDIX 195 

to taking a step so serious as this he must be sure that 
it is as a Christian, as a man who is first a son of God, 
that he refuses, and not as a sectarian or a party man. 
And furthermore, he ought to be persuaded that his 
action is not merely that of a private individual, but 

will be finally for the good of all. 

* * * * 

Church and State. — That the Church and the 
community should be finally coterminous is the ideal. 
A Christian nation will be a Church. That the Church 
should be a tool or appendage or mouthpiece of the 
State is as far from the ideal as it well could be. The 
Church must be absolutely free to bear its own witness. 
It should be, within its own borders, the representation 
to the world of what a Christian community will 
mean. The beauty of its buildings and of its services, 
the freedom and joy of its life, the fellowship of its 
members, in which the things that divide men are 
transcended, — these things should at once be a 

prophecy and an inducement. 

* * * * 

The Future of the Church. — All kinds of reasons 
are given in these days for the failure and weakness of 
the Church, but only one matters : — that it should 
not represent Christ. Of that, other things — its 
petty divisions, its efforts after self-preservation, its 
elaborate justifications of current morality, are but 
symptoms. 

We want a new synthesis, a truly Catholic and 
International Church which will stand above all things 
for the Christian way of life. In such a Church there 
will be room for every sort of witness and every variety 
of Christian experience. But it will only be possible 
when all the separate churches are willing to perish 
that the new may be created. In losing their life they 
will find it. The greatest duty of any one of the 
churches at the moment is to make itself unnecessary. 

18a 



196 APPENDIX 



III. — Christianity and War. 

The General Question. — War stands condemned, 
for the Christian utterly and finally. Not because 
there is some rule that the use of force is always wrong. 
There is no such rule. It would be foolishness. Nor 
yet because war is attended with great suffering, nor 
because it is a frightful waste, though these things 
enter into the argument. Furthermore, there are 
worse things than the killing of the body, though to 
say so is not to justify such killing. 

(1) War denies certain things Christ stands for. It 
denies the infinite value of personalities. A man 
is merely a wheel or a screw in a huge impersonal 
machine which is to smash or be smashed. It denies 
the way of life by fellowship. It denies the way of 
overcoming evil by good — the way of redemption. 
(These things are true more or less of the whole military 
system.) 

(2) The Christian Church has one business and no 
other : to represent the things Christ stands for. 

The Particular Instance. — Thousands of 
Christians who, before August, 1914, would have 
assented heartily to the above statements are now 
quite certain, not only that Christians may participate 
in war, but that it is their duty to do so. Broadly 
speaking, the religious press and the leaders of the 
churches are with them. This is true of all the 
countries concerned. It is not that it has been 
discovered that our old principles are untrue or dis- 
proved. The most war -like of our religious leaders 
would not, I imagine, go so far as that. The position 
generally seems to be that the exigencies of the 
situation demand a temporary suspension of these 
principles. For the moment our universal ideal must 



APPENDIX 197 

be sacrificed to our national need. This is not said 
for condemnation. One cannot but sympathise with 
Christians who said : Our government could not, in 
the position in which it found itself, do other than 
go to war. We have allowed the government to act 
for us all along with little or no protest. To seek to 
stand aside now or to withold our support would be 
the meanest kind of cowardice. 

But the moral of that is, at least, that we must 
never be so caught again. 

Furthermore, we cannot but honour the thousands 
of our youth who have given themselves with a devotion 
beyond all praise and from a chivalrous sense of duty 
to the distressed. But they want to see war made 
an end of. Is their sacrifice to be vain ? 

From any point of view then the urgent practical 
question for the Christian is : What are we going to 
do in the future ? Our leaders will no doubt endeavour 
to sound again the old note when this crisis is past. 
It will be interesting, to watch in some cases. But it 
is obviously vain to suppose that we can let things go 
on as before, and hope that by our continuing to hold 
the theory that war is evil and oppposed to Christ we 
shall somehow end it. We have been told already that 
this war is the " tragedy of the weak though righteous 
Christian will."* Do we want another such tragedy ? 

It is time that Christian people of all nations began 
to ask certain questions : 

How long must we be content to be dragged at the 
tail of government policies and allow governments to 
pursue ways which make war likely and meanwhile, 
to assume, as they do, that all our theoretical objections 
to war will prove to be mere talk when the pinch comes, 
and that in a crisis our pulpits and the religious press 
will be with them ? Are they still to be encouraged 
to assume that our patriotism is real, but our religion 

* H. G. Wells : The War that will end War. 



198 APPENDIX 

is only a hobby ? That is what has happened. The 
Christian Church and the Christian conscience, after 
much feeling and talk against war in the abstract, 
becomes, with some exceptions, a mere appendage of 
the government. Even if it has deserved such a fate, 
that does not make it less pitiable. 

Can we make sure that it will not happen again ? 

We are told that this must be the last war, that 
measures must be taken to prevent any recurrence of 
a conflict so bloody, so wasteful, and so likely to create 
enduring bitterness between the nations. Many 
proposals have been made for such re-arrangements 
of territory and of international management as will 
ensure perpetual peace. Let us hope that they will 
succeed, and do our utmost to help to that end. But 
is it sufficient for the Christian to await the efforts of 
others, so that when peace is won he may finally show 
his hatred of war without fear that any shall doubt 
his patriotism ? It will be safe then. But is this how 
we have learned Christ ? 

Can the Christian Church end war — at least so far 
as it is concerned, or must it bring up the rear ? 

We have been called upon to repent ; to repent, 
one gathers, for any share we may have had by 
omission or commission in the events which led to the 
war. I learned a good while ago that repentance is 
true sorrow for sin, and sincere effort to forsake it. 
We have seen in an earlier chapter something of what 
that involved. We must bring forth the fruits of 
repentance. We must show God and men and govern- 
ments that we do repent. 

How can we make our repentance credible ? 

I have asked three questions which I will repeat. 

1. Can we — meaning Christians of all nations — 
do anything to make sure that ambitious rulers and 
governments will not again be able to use us for 
the working of irreparable damage upon one another ? 



APPENDIX 199 

3. Can the Christian Church lead in the stopping of 
war, or must it wait until other prudential reasons 
work the miracle ? 

3. Can we make it clear to the world that we repent 
and are heartily sorry for any part we may have played 
in making war unavoidable ? 

We can do all these things, but only in one way. 
Let the Church refuse to have anything more to do 
with war. Let Christians henceforth bear arms 
no more. Without our help the nations of Europe 
cannot wage war. In view of the present conflict 
that should come home to our conscience. 

That is one side. It may seem wholly negative, 
though it is not so. It is a guarantee of goodwill. 
On the other side Christians must, more deliberately and 
earnestly than has ever been done, extend the field of 
fellowship. It must be made clear that the church of 
Christ is something more than a national institution. 
There is little good reason why the Christians of 
England and those of any other country should not 
have as true fellowship with one another as the 
Christians of neighbouring counties. But if the 
deputation from Durham always visited Yorkshire 
with revolvers in their pockets and discovered that the 
Yorkshiremen were similarly guarded, their professions 
of fraternity, even to themselves, would ring somewhat 
hollow. Yet this has been practically the basis on 
which the leaders of our churches have done their 
international visiting. While the talk of fellowship 
was in full flow, both sides knew that there were 
thousands of Christians, in whose name they were 
speaking, at that moment under arms which they were 
prepared to use on one another if their respective 
governments gave the order. It is to mock the fellow- 
ship of Christ to make such pretences to friendship. 
We must make our desire for fellowship known by 
means that can bear no other explanation. There will 



200 APPENDIX 

be only one way after this that European Christians 
can meet, and that is with all arms laid down for ever. 
No political treaty can guarantee us against the tragedy 
of having again to face as mortal enemies our fellows 
in Christ, and even though the treaty should be backed 
up by the military and economic pressure of a whole 
continent, it would still remain the ironic truth — if 
Christians continue to bear arms — that fellow-believers 
in Christ have to be held back from one anothers' 
throats by other considerations than their religion 
provides. Better than trusting to any treaty, and by 
far the best guarantee of any treaty, will be the under- 
standing that henceforth Christians leave warmaking 
to those who believe in it. 

Surely it is possible for the Churches of Europe to 
come to such an understanding on this matter that 
the treaty makers will understand that we stand 
for fellowship, and can no longer be depended upon 
to deny the principles of our life at their bidding. 
That is the wrong sort of self-denial. In all their 
efforts to bridge differences, to break down artificial 
barriers, to promote understanding, to build up a 
Europe of free nationalities which shall no longer 
jealously regard each other across armed and tariff- 
walled frontiers, but shall each contribute what it 
best can to the common good of all, they will have our 
heartiest support, but in playing the game of inter- 
national chess with the manhood of the nations for 
stakes, — we must refuse to be any longer a party 
to that. 

Nor may we wait until all are agreed before we 
individually take our stand. There is a great opport- 
unity for the leaders of our churches here, but we 
cannot wait even for them. Perhaps we can help them 
to move now, but when all are agreed our testimony 
will not be worth much. The waiting of one upon 
another has been the stronghold of evil since the world 



APPENDIX 201 

began. It is the excuse for the perpetuation of every 
hoary wrong. We have learned that the satisfaction 
of our deepest demand for personality involves un- 
questioning loyalty to the will of the Father, without 
regard to consequences, and certainly without waiting 
upon the approval of others. 

In the case of Jesus it meant a course which seemed 
to be the denial of the nationalist hope of His time, the 
restoration of the Kingdom to Israel. And it meant 
the cross. 

Whether it means that to us or not is not our concern. 
But we know that we are denying Christ if we shrink 
from the way He chose when once we have seen what 
it is. 

" Put up thy sword into its sheath." 

IV. — Christianity and Industry. 

How to express Christianity in terms of modern 
industrial enterprise : that is a problem that must 
be solved. Not only has it not been solved but, so 
far as I am able to discover, there is no very clear 
understanding of the nature of the problem. It is not, 
how can a modern industrial enterprise be run so that 
Christian sentiment — that delicate thing — shall not be 
offended, or so that feelings of amiable toleration shall 
exist between employer and employed, or so that no 
one works too long for too little, or in unhealthy 
conditions. The employer who was sharp to his own 
advantage would see to that much, and might even add 
a little profit sharing at the end of the year, without 
truly bringing Christ into the business. And he might 
do all that and much more, and have prayer meetings 
with his workpeople and preach Christianity to them, 
and be himself reckoned a splendid example of the 
just, considerate and even generous employer, and yet 
only succeed in tempering industry with Christianity. 



202 APPENDIX 

That is, all this pleasant and praiseworthy demeanour 
is not of the essence of the industry. It is superimposed 
upon or runs alongside of the business part. And 
for that reason, though one may gladly admit that it 
represents a sincere effort to do the Christian thing it 
fails to meet the demand of Personality and fellow- 
ship at an esseneial point. 

Moreover, it is only possible when the business 
is almost entirely a personal or family affair. When 
one comes to the modern concern where the ultimate 
employer is some thousands of shareholders, then that 
sort of superimposed Christianity is impossible, and 
if Christ is not in the business, in the very essence of 
it, He remains altogether outside. 

Is it not odd also that in speaking about running an 
industry Christ-wise we should have to consider it as 
a problem for employers and masters? It is literally 
devilish odd, that is. But still, what can the workers 
do towards it, as things stand? Work as hard as they 
can, keep sober, never complain, and cheerfully give 
up a shilling a week each when bad times require it ? 
What more Christian way could there be than that ? 

It seems to me that we have not got hold of Christ 
finally in these matters yet, and that our efforts at 
expressing our religion in the world of industry are too 
much like the efforts of those who try to introduce 
religion into music in the shape of what are described 
as " sacred songs." I am not thinking of oratorios, 
nor even of the good rousing chorus you will get at 
a Salvation Army meeting, but of the sort which 
provide stained glass and tremolo stop effects for 
Pleasant Sunday Afternoons. 

" No applause, please," says the chairman. " This 
is a sacred song." 

Can we get at the problem by working out a concrete 
case, beginning at the beginning and taking nothing 
for granted. 



APPENDIX 203 

Here are a dozen men with a thousand pounds each 
who are desirous of engaging in some honest industry. 
All I mean by the adjective here is that they wish to 
take natural resources and turn them to account in 
some way that will produce things good for life. I 
will say nothing here about the right or wrong of 
interest, or we shall never get any further. They want 
another twelve thousand pounds to enable them to 
start in a profitable way, and announce their object. 
We will even suppose that they make it understood 
that this affair is to be Christian throughout. Possibly 
that might make it difficult for them to get more 
capital, and they would find healthy food for thought 
in considering why that was so. They will have to 
explain that they understand that nothing is worth 
doing in this world which will not help in making the 
kingdom of God possible, and that therefore this 
business will aim at developing and giving scope 
to the expression of personality as well as providing 
for its needs. It will be a fellowship in production. 
That is what industry means to a Christian, if his 
religion is his life, and not something stuck on to 
his life. 

But suppose the Christian twelve say, " Well now, 
we are sincerely anxious to see this business enterprise 
that is Christian all through, but we cannot begin by 
talking like that. People would at once conclude that 
we intend to abscond with their money. We will get 
the money all right. Suppose you have the money. 
The factory is built, and the machines are in. We 
have two hundred hands ready to start. Now 
what ? " 

Then who is running this business ? 
' There is a manager, who is responsible to a board 
of directors, who represent all the shareholders." 

And which among the directors represent the men 
who work ? 



204 APPENDIX 

" Oh, come, what right have they to a director ? 
They have put no money into the business." 

But they have put money's worth, to take things 
at their lowest. If one of the shareholders came along 
you could not show him his hundred pounds. You 
might point him to a machine and tell him that his 
hundred pounds was there, and that he would get ten 
pounds a year for leaving it there. But because he has 
in the concern machinery worth ten pounds a year, 
he is, through a director, to have a voice in the manage- 
ment. The man who puts in labour worth a hundred 
pounds a year is to have no voice. 

" That is the custom." 

There then, it seems to me, is one important point 
in which the Christian-all-through method of industry 
will differ from any other sort. The example, doubt- 
less, is crude, and there are many considerations I 
have omitted to notice, but this seems sure from all 
we have seen of the meaning of Christianity, that all 
who are engaged in such an enterprise will be real 
partners in the concern. If they are not, then you 
treat them, in the essential point of their contact with 
the industry, as things, not as personalities. You 
have denied fellowship. Many of the necessary details 
on which men are employed in such a concern have no 
interest whatever to any rational being in themselves. 
They afford no scope either for the expression or the 
development of Personality. They only have interest 
in their relation to the complete enterprise. To refuse 
that larger interest is to condemn them to soul destroy- 
ing labour. No business can be Christian in its nature 
which does that. All the kind treatment in the world, 
short hours, pleasant conditions, games rooms, free 
doctors, and anything else you like, are only coverings 
for a relation between employer and employed which 
is wrong at the root. It is a denial of the right to 
Personality. The employer may be a Christian and 



APPENDIX 205 

the men may all be Christians and meet in his Bible- 
class, but the business is not Christian. Christ is not 
essentially in it. 

Nor will He be in any business until Christian 
relationship is established between all the various 
people who are concerned at the point at which business 
is done, and not just before or after. The relationship 
between employer and employed which is the basis 
of the modern limited company is in its nature un- 
christian. To assent to it is to say finally, that the 
man who has the money has the power and the right 
over against the man who has personality only. You 
may be sure that the man with the money ought to 
be most considerate of the other, of his health and his 
family and his religious state, and even that he ought 
to pay him well. But it does not matter how you put 
it. You have exalted money over Personality, and 
that is mammon worship. 

Nothing will remove that reproach save the 
admission, in business practice, that the labourer also 
is a son of God, and that his divine personality must 
find room for expression and scope for development. 
His work will then, may be, become a vocation and 
not a meaningless task. He will not escape discipline, 
but it will be the discipline of fellowship, the most 
fruitful kind. What refinements come now will have 
a real value. They will be the expression of the 
personality of the men, as well as the masters. The 
model village which expresses the goodwill of a master 
is a fine thing, but as the expression of a desire in which 
the men have had equal share it will be still more 
valuable. 

Is it still a problem for masters and employers only, 
this expressing of Christianity in terms of industry ? 

No, for employees have been guilty of mammon 
worship. In times of industrial dispute I have heard 
men declaiming hotly about the degrading slavery of 



206 APPENDIX 

their work, and their determination to starve rather 
than return before their conditions were complied with. 
And the conditions ? Almost invariably an increase 
of wages, " a bob a week more all round," perhaps, or 
a lessening of hours. If they get this they will go 
back. Are we to conclude then either, that when they 
talked so warmly about " degrading slavery " and so 
forth, they did not really mean what they said and were 
only using strong language out of habit, or, that they 
are quite willing to go on being degraded slaves if 
they are better paid for it or have shorter spells of 
time at it ? 

It may be and often is necessary to protest against 
long hours and short wages, but neither of these things 
is the essence of slavery. The slavery is in consenting 
or being compelled to labour on a thing in which you 
can have no personal interest, in selling yourself to 
the ends of another private person to whom you are 
merely a thing. That is acquiescence in the denial of 
Personality and Fellowship. 

The trades unions have tempered things a little, 
no doubt, in some respects at rather a long price to 
free men, but they have not been able to achieve 
fellowship between money and labour, for which they 
can scarcely be blamed, and they have not missed 
mammon worship. Because of that, though it may 
be unjust enough in the face of the facts on the other 
side, they have had much less sympathy from the 
general public than otherwise they would have had. 
For though we may do a little mammon-worshipping 
ourselves, we do not like to see others guilty of it ! 

Romain Rolland puts it into the mouth of John 
Christopher : 

" As long as you are out for material interests, you 
don't interest me. The day when you march out for 
a belief, then I shall be with you." 
* Come out for Christ's sake and see what happens. 



APPENDIX 207 

I trust I have made it clear in the course of this book 
what that means. It will not be merely for more of 
what is already the price of degradation, but for the 
rights of personality against the power of money. 

I have put down this one suggestion alone, not 
because I imagine that the representation of the 
workers on every board of directors would produce 
an industrial millenium, nor because there is nothing 
more to be said about the expression of Christ in 
modern industry, but because I am quite convinced 
that no movement of any sort will deliver industry 
or the workers, short of co-operation by labour 
and capital in a common enterprise, and such co-oper- 
ation as acknowledges the personality of every man 
concerned. 

I wanted to point out to the Christian, whether 
master or man, and leave in the emphasis of loneliness 
the point at which modern industry and business denies 
Christ. 

" One is your Master, even Christ, and all ye are 
brethren/ ' That is not a motto for Sundays only, 
but for Mondays as well. Paint it on the factory gates. 



APPENDIX B. 

ON NIETZSCHE 

It is not because at the present moment he is a 
kind of popular Aunt Sally for any one who cares 
to have his fling at, nor because I think that he 
" caused the war," that there are so many references 
to Nietzsche in the foregoing pages. The main lines 
of this book were in my mind before Nietzsche had 
attained to his present notoriety, and I refer to him 
because he, more than anyone else I know, has made 
articulate and attractive certain ideas about life and 
its meaning which are widely believed in by many 
people of to-day. That Nietzsche would have utterly 
disavowed these people does not matter. Most of them 
have never bothered their heads about his teaching and 
repudiate it when they see the meaning of their ways 
set plainly before them. One cannot even call them un- 
conscious disciples, for their ideas are as old as the 
hills. It would be nearer the mark to say that 
Nietzsche, instead of being a bold pioneer of thought 
in these matters, was a camp follower with a note 
book, " writing up " the actions and standards of 
others. And this is the answer to those Nietzsche- 
ans who suggest that the Christian is of necessity 
incapable of appreciating the values that Nietzsche 
would have us live by. The Christian does appreciate 
them. He has fought these things in himself and has 
left them behind. He does not find that " with 
every degree of a man's growth towards greatness 
and loftiness, he also grows downwards into the depths 
and into the terrible" (i.e., the beast). 

208 



APPENDIX 209 

We may sincerely sympathise with Nietzsche's 
revolt against what is sordid and weak and poor 
in our modern life, against the idea that " this paltry 
and peaceful mediocrity " is to be regarded " as 
something high, or possibly as the standard of all 
things," though even in this he is, to quote his own 
words again, apt " to demand great and rare things, 
and then to declare, with anger and contempt of his 
fellows, that they do not exist." He is often the 
" embittered idealist." 

His revolt was so extreme that it carried him right 
round and back again into the thing he thought he 
was fighting, the very denial of life which seemed 
to him the chief evil. His doctrine of Eternal 
Recurrence is the end of hope, and his passion for 
the terrible, his pride in the idea of loneliness and 
misunderstanding, his admiration for endurance for 
endurance sake are the essence of the asceticism 
he stormed at. 

One of the best comments on Nieztsche's teaching 
that I have seen, I chanced upon in a novel a day or 
two ago. In The Encounter, by Anne Douglas 
Sedgwick, he appears as one of the chief characters, 
and a friend says of him : 

"It is with him always the desire to surmount 
himself that explains his theories. The most horrible 
thing his thought can show him, that he must believe 
in, that he must test himself upon. It is an act of 
faith. . . . And at the bottom of his soul lies 
the renunciation of life, yes, the indifference to life 
which he so dreads." 

His desire for a free and fearless life, for strength 
to prevail over weakness, for the elevation of the 
type Man, is a noble desire. But I think him to be 
utterly mistaken in his main ideas as to how these 
things are to be achieved. One may say roughly 
that he wants a life which is wholly made up of 



210 APPENDIX 

" thrills." That is sheer sentiment alism. The man 
who cannot see the wonder and glory of common 
life, and must have " thrills " to keep him going, 
is not of a very vital type. His taste is suspiciously 
like that of those who gloat over the luridly illustrated 
police news which some papers serve up to us. 

Nietzsche has said much that is inspiring, much 
that needed saying, and all that he has to say he says 
well. When he is the seer calling men to the heights, 
there is gold in his speech, and as a protest against 
the flabbiness of a good deal of modern thought he 
is a good tonic, but when he falls to theorising he is 
the victim of sentimental prejudices. His reading 
of the Will to Power is a sentimentalist's rebound 
from weakness. It is true that the insolence and 
cruelty of the strong is better than the insolence and 
cruelty of the weak, but are we driven to these alterna- 
tives ? His Genealogy of Morals is as fanciful as many 
other genealogies. 

Nietzsche's account of Christianity is parody, but 
it is sadly possible that he may not have been the 
real author of it, but only the transcriber of what 
was presented to him. When he sets over against 
the weaknesses he considers to be due to Christianity 
the values he would have men prefer, one is repeatedly 
pulled up by the thought, " But this is Christianity! " 
There are exceptions to this, of course, but, as it happens, 
the exceptions could not exist in the same individual, 
and, moreover, one only needs to turn over a few 
pages to find him contradicting himself on his own 
account. 

We Christians owe Nietzsche something if he has 
helped us to discover that our religion is a bigger 
thing than we had thought. 



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